For more than six years now I have been sharing snippets and vignettes from my waltz with leukemia. But what I haven’t spoken of much was the dance that my mom was living parallel to my own; first with breast cancer and then in the last three months, stage four lung cancer.
Two weeks ago, my sisters texted me from hospice, “Mom is asking if you are coming up.” My brother, Bruce, and I texted back that we were on our way. When we arrived, all four of Mom’s adult children, her son-in-law, four grandchildren, and her only sister spent the next few days sitting bedside vigil, singing worship songs and telling stories as her body broke down hour after hour. Thursday night near midnight Mom was asleep, comfortable and breathing easy. As we all left the room, my sister, Lauran, waved and tearfully whispered to her, “It’s ok, Mom, you can go now. We are all ok, and we love you. Thank you for being our mom all these years and loving us even when we were unlovable. We will see you again on the other side.”
Mom’s last breath was the next morning at 6:45 on August 9th, about an hour before we all would have arrived. Each of us believes that it was no coincidence she left when we were not present; perhaps, loving us to the end in wanting to spare her children the pain of the moment her spirit left her failing body.
I was scribbling thoughts in a black composition notebook throughout the 45 days beginning the day I received the text that said it was lung cancer, and then through meetings with the church, the funeral home, the cemetery, the florists, the musicians, the accountants, the realtor, and the bankers. Dying isn’t that simple, at least not for the living. No matter how much I recorded, it was still all a blur. We kept telling Mom and each other, “Let's do this well, Mom. Just like you did for 82 years!” And as the chapter closes and time moves along, I believe we did it well; we read it well and we lived it well.
Before the funeral mass and after the receiving line, I stood at the front of the church and said a eulogy of sorts, welcoming everyone and inviting them to worship and celebrate in Mom’s Catholic Parish, singing the hymns she had listened to her last days. I shared the story of one Sunday morning as a child when I told her that I wasn’t feeling well and so she let me skip church that morning. Apparently, it was a short-acting virus and I was feeling better within 15 minutes and went outside to play whiffle ball in our side yard with my buddies Chris and Tim. I shared how I will never forget the sight of my mom returning from church, hunched over the steering wheel of our red Ford Malibu station wagon as she drove past us and turned into the driveway. The weight of her stare as she drove past our whiffle ball game still impacts me to this day. She came around the side of the house and indelibly tattooed my soul when she said, “God gives you 24 hours a day seven days a week, and you can’t give Him an hour on Sunday? Shame on you.” Turning on her heel, she walked inside. By the end of the morning, I was begging her to take me to church.
Although I am not a proponent of the heavy guilt trip technique, I do agree with Bruce when he said, “In the end, the most important gift Mom gave her children was that she pointed us all to God.” And although Mom’s four children express their faith in different ways, it is true: Mom’s gift was one of faith.
Mom was known in our family as Babci, the polish word for grandmother. For 35 years of high school sports in Central Bucks county, everybody knew her as “Mrs. Stan,” and some described her as a mother to all of us through the years. Her family legacy includes her four adult children and their spouses, 15 grandchildren and one great-grandson.
I am home now, back in North Carolina, trying to settle into some sort of normal before the kiddos go back to school. It all seems surreal. We have photos and memories from the funeral and life celebrations that we will cherish forever, but something is significantly different. Grieving will take time. The hardest reality is that there is no more Mom to call, to check in with, to fly down for holidays with the grandkids or to ask about an old polish recipe. I won't be getting any voicemails from a 267 area code asking, “Why haven’t you called your mom lately? Is everything ok?” I will miss even those.
I know losing people to death is a part of life, and I feel the weight of being able to pay tribute to my mom’s life instead of having her bury her oldest son. Even now as I write, I remember seeing her sitting up in that hospital bed shaking her finger at me on her first day in hospice. In defiant protest, she declared, “This rose is not done blooming yet.”
The other day as I was unpacking, I opened my composition notebook one last time and the first page was still blank. Like all my scribble pads, I always leave that first page blank, because it is only after they are filled can I put any kind of appropriate title page to its contents. But this time I knew exactly what to write:
Death is not a period! It is a comma. And the Lord is the exclamation point.
Mom, you bloomed for 82 years; roses, thorns, and all. We love you and will carry your spirit within us until we meet again in glory.
Yes, and amen. Yes. And Amen.