Written shortly after we lost my mother, this story is about her death. It has not been published, although I wanted very much to find it a public home.

When Mom went into the hospital on November 13th, it was “no big deal”. After all, she did this every 3-4 months. They gave her breathing treatments and sent her home. She referred to it as “getting her pipes cleaned”. My mother had COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease – compliments of 45 years of smoking. She also had heart disease – likely from the same thing. Over the last couple of years, she had had one heart attack and two angioplasties. Later that first evening, she called to say they were releasing her the next day. But the next day she called to say they wanted to run some more tests. The next we heard, she was in ICU on a ventilator and sedated. She had double pneumonia. The next six weeks were a nightmare. Nothing happened the way the doctors said it would. Mom couldn’t breathe without the ventilator – every time they tried to take her off the machine, her heart started racing out of control. They did an angiogram to find the problem but there was nothing they could fix – her heart muscles were simply too weak to compensate for her damaged lungs. My brother Mike lives in Oceanside, very close to Mom. I live in Los Angeles with my fiancé, Wally, so it wasn’t as easy for me to run back and forth to the hospital. Not wanting to fight traffic, I had to settle for leaving work early on Wednesdays, catching a train down there, staying for a couple of hours, and taking the train back. On Saturdays I took the train down in the morning and back in the evening. My home routine quickly became a shambles but what was happening with Mom took priority. The visits were always the same. Looking at our mother, unconscious with a tube in her throat, IVs in her arm, a vitals clip on her finger, her hands tied to the bed, wearing a diaper. I honestly didn’t know how Mike could stand to see her like that every day; I was having a rough time doing it twice a week. After almost three weeks, they did a tracheotomy so her vocal chords wouldn’t be damaged by the tube. They took her off the sedative in the hopes that if she was more aware of what was happening, she would be able to recover. But she didn’t wake up. Then a CAT-scan revealed that she had suffered a stroke and there was brain damage. We were told she would never get better; she would never come home. We had to make a choice between taking her off the ventilator or putting her in long-term care – a convalescent home. We knew Mom never wanted to be left on life support; she never wanted to be a vegetable. After much soul searching and several gut-wrenching discussions, Mike and I made the decision to take her off the ventilator. On Wednesday, December 29th Wally and I took an early morning train to Oceanside. Mike picked us up and we arrived at the hospital about 10:30. Mom’s two closest friends, Bob and Yae, were already there. They had fixed her hair and dressed her in her favorite dressing gown. As we had previously discussed with the doctor, Mom was on a morphine drip to keep her distress level to a minimum. They also gave her a shot of Ativan to make her last moments “comfortable.” It was time. They took her off the ventilator about 11:15. We knew it would be quick - an hour at the most. We all gathered around, Mike and I holding her hands. But Fate, Murphy, and my mother have a quirky sense of humor. She breathed on her own quite well for much longer than anyone would have believed, the doctors included. Because of the trach, they had to keep her hooked up to a tube with moist air running through it. It was also delivering 30% oxygen, but Mom was doing all the work; she was breathing on her own - even though she had not been able to do so before. Having already said their good-byes, Bob and Yae left after a couple of hours. They asked us to call them “when it happened.” Mike went home later that night – he was convinced she would still be there the next morning. And she was. I stayed day and night by her bedside. Mike spent the days at the hospital and went home at night. Wally stayed with me and we did the best we could to grab a few minutes of sleep sitting in chairs the first night and then trading off on a fold-out chair that the nurses found for us. When Mike came back each morning, Wally would go over to Mom’s house for awhile to try to get a little rest. I was pretty much doing without sleep. I was running on caffeine and nerves but I felt it was what I needed to do. Bob and Yae came for a short visit each day, as they had done every day since she had gone into ICU. The third night was the worst. The nurse made a mistake when she replaced the morphine drip syringe; she set it to deliver .5 mg per hour instead of the 6 mg Mom was getting at that time. Her heart rate shot up to 155-160 and stayed there for over half an hour. She was agitated to the point of being violent – we struggled to hold her down, in spite of the restraints she had on her arms. The nurses finally recognized their error and fixed it but I am sure Mom had another stroke during the time her heart rate was so high. After that, one side of her mouth drooped and she seemed to be even further away from us, wherever it was she had gone. Time went on. Both her saturation level and her heart rate remained high. Her blood pressure dropped drastically once and then came back up to normal. At that point, we didn’t know what to wish for. We didn’t want her to die but we knew she could never get better; and if she did, she would have one hell of an addiction to overcome after all that morphine! As her tolerance increased, they eventually bumped the morphine to 10 mg per hour – still the only goal was to do whatever was necessary to keep her comfortable until it was over. She was also being given Ativan upon our request and we were requesting it fairly often; we just couldn’t stand to see her thrashing around like she was in pain. On Saturday, Wally called a friend to go over to our house and feed the cats – we had only left them food for two days! On Sunday, he decided to go home for awhile. It was January 2nd and the rent needed to be paid, not to mention that the cat box was in drastic need of cleaning . . . Mike stayed that night so I wouldn't be alone. Mom could pass at any minute and I didn't want to face it by myself. On Monday, Mom was still hanging in there. The doctors kept saying it couldn't possibly be more than another day or two. Monday was Day Number Five. Wally came back that afternoon and the three of us continued our vigil. Monday night she became very congested. After having the nurse suction her lungs three times in less than an hour and watching Mom choke and gag but with no noticeable improvement, we made the decision not to do it anymore. By then, her saturation level had dropped to the low 80s and they had bumped her up to 40% oxygen. Her breathing started to become erratic and by 3:30 Tuesday morning, we knew we were facing her final hours. But still she held on, the three of us watching her every breath. After talking to a hospice nurse, we wondered if there could be something Mom was waiting for. Trying to figure out what it was – what we had left undone - we started calling people and letting them say goodbye to her. While Mike and Wally were out of the room, I talked to her, making peace for all the imagined hurts and wrongs I had felt resentment about for so many years. Still she breathed on. Knowing the end was near, I asked for a rainbow. I wanted Mom to have a nice send-off – and a chance to grab that pot of gold she had been after for so many years. But it had been raining for over a week and it was overcast that morning. Mike and Wally both looked at the sky and said there was no way in hell we would be seeing a rainbow. I insisted that Mom WOULD have a rainbow. Mike argued that we might not be able to see it from the one small window in the fourth-floor hospital room. I told him that's where we were so of course we would be able to see it – it couldn’t be anywhere else. I wanted her to go over the rainbow . . . . Wally went back to Mom’s house for awhile to get some sleep. Unhappily, Mike and I decided to leave Mom by herself for awhile in case she preferred to die alone. We wandered around the hospital grounds, looking at the gray sky and humming Over The Rainbow; no doubt causing many people to question our sanity. But still there were only clouds in the sky. No rainbow. We went back up the room - Mom was still huffing and puffing. I laid down to take a short nap while Mike kept watch. At some point Wally came in. He and Mike watched TV while I slept. Mike told me later that they heard a scrabbling noise on the roof and then several ravens flew past the window. One actually flew into the window, smacking itself hard against the glass! They joked about it looking for sandwiches. Mike glanced back at the bed and discovered that Mom was not breathing. He leaned forward to look closer, and then closer still. When she took a sudden breath, Mike gasped and jerked back! Her breathing was slow and erratic and Wally quickly woke me up. I rushed over to the bed. I reached Mom's side in time to see her last two breaths. I reached for her pulse and felt a slight fluttering, which then faded away. It was 3:10pm on Tuesday, January 4th. Wally held me for several minutes as I broke down. Then, crying, I staggered to the window and looked outside. And there in the sky, where meteorological conditions dictated it should not exist, was a rainbow. The raven on the window sill flew away toward it. Five minutes later, the rainbow was gone . . . THE END A Tribute to my Mother Her name was Frances Worley Known by many, loved by all She loved to solve your problems All you had to do was call She always loved the ocean She claimed it as her own There her ashes will be scattered Where she will feel at home Of books she had hundreds Of cats she had but four No doubt if there had been more time She would have gathered more Her love affair with Christmas Her addiction to the mail Her penchant for black coffee Her grand schemes that always failed Her strengths and her weaknesses That made her who she was That made us laugh and shake our heads But sometimes gave us pause We knew her time was limited How short we couldn’t guess Our sorrow when the end arrived Mere words cannot express On the day she left us A raven said good-bye Then spread her wings and flew away To a rainbow in the sky