Segment 4 – One Year Later…

Yesterday, December 8, 2018, marked one year since my mom has been gone. One year since I sat in that ICU room and held her hand as her heartbeat slowed down to a stop. One year since I listened to nurses and neurologists explain that she was, in effect, dead now, with tests showing no brain activity and infection levels higher than they remember ever seeing before. One year since I looked out her hospital window and saw snow fall in December in South Carolina. That never happens. Yet, one year later, it is happening again. At almost the exact same time. This year, however, the snow is sticking, predicted to last for days, not fading away by morning as it did last year.

Now, I am an educated woman who should know better, but I am convinced my mom sent that snow last year, and she  is sending it again now. She knows how much we, my sister, my step-dad, and I, love snow. She loved it along with us when we were little, but when she was older and working in a textile mill, she hated it. If the mill were running, that meant she and my step-dad had to get out early and make it across town and back in weather they had never grown used to driving in because it happened so rarely. The regular 30-minute drive would take an hour or more in icy weather. And if the snow was bad enough to close the mill, that was even worse. She couldn’t stand the thought of missing work, and she would spend the time at home in the  snow trying to figure out which bills she could shuffle if she missed a day’s pay.

When I began telling the story of how my mom passed away, I planned to add stories here on this blog as I encountered them in my memories. I wanted to keep a record of her life here, and I still do. I want to make sure she isn’t forgotten, and that my children, who knew her later in life, have a chance to know the person she was when I was little. And I want to my grandchildren to know something about their history, as well. I want to paint the picture clearly of the day I rushed out of school and headed to the hospital, thinking she was headed into surgery, only to find out she was headed to Heaven instead. I will tell that story one day. Maybe soon. Yet, overall, I have rarely found myself back at the computer to write about my mom this first year without her, and I could give a million reasons why. My life is incredibly busy, but it always has been. The week I was away from work after her death was filled with unending meetings with insurance companies and funeral homes and government agents. I don’t think I had a single moment to still still and remember or cry or mourn.

I remember friends sitting with me at my house in the evenings, talking and laughing, sharing and eating together to help me transition into my new world. I remember going back to school, and my students and coworkers were loving and kind and giving, and I remember feeling comforted and grateful. I remember trying to get my Christmas shopping done and running into a friend who had lost her mother several years ago, and we talked there for a few minutes between men’s clothing racks of the department store.

“I feel in a fog,” I told her.

“It will be surreal for a while,” Betsy explained. And she was right.

Months passed, all busy – I threw myself into my life’s work – my children, my husband, my profession, my beliefs. I hardly had a moment to myself, and that was ok, I thought. I believe my husband knew better, though, and he asked some time around April if I would like to try a new gym. I was trying to get in shape, frustrated with my lack of progress,  so I jumped at the chance. What I didn’t realize, but I think he realized, is that punching and kicking for 30 minutes a day might actually be therapeutic physically, mentally, and spiritually. And he was right.

Then, one day this summer, at a business meeting for a professional organization, I sat with a friend and colleague, who once again, had lost a parent  a few months before I had. We were discussing what had been done and what needed to be done in our organization, and I said, “I can’t believe we are halfway through summer. I have so much still to do. This year has been rough, but I can’t even tell you why exactly.”

“Kristie, you lost your mom; you are still grieving,” Becky said. And she was right.

Sitting there in the middle of the bank lobby, I started crying a little. Not wails or boo-hoos,  but a steady trickle of tears for a mom I had not yet mourned.

Throughout this year, I have found that I sense her in seemingly unlikely situations, but then again, not so unlikely. I see a pair of white tennis shoes or a pretty brown pocketbook in Wal-Mart, and the lump in my throat cuts off my breath all of a sudden. She would have loved those items, would have probably purchased them for herself. In fact, my friend Wanda told me just yesterday that she could have sworn she saw my mom in Wal-Mart one day recently because that is where she always ran into her for years before she passed.

I wear her jewelry (and some of her clothes) with pride, and each time I do, it brings back a different memory or a sense of her – her style, her preferences, her quirkiness. I even have a mint green skirt set that I wore when I was younger, then gave it to her, and now I have it back again, and I plan to wear it to  school or church some time before Christmas. Not an heirloom by any stretch of the imagination, but one more way to feel close to her, one year later.

And one year later, I find myself crying for her again. The pain of her loss, so long packaged and put on a shelf for later because life must go on, has been reopened with my boxes of Christmas decorations. I won’t let my tears ruin the wonder of today’s snow or the excitement of Christmas morning, but I couldn’t find the energy to send out Christmas cards last year, and I don’t know that I have the energy to start that tradition back again this year, either. I think visiting her grave yesterday might have taken the time I could have printed some photo cards, and the time I am writing this might have taken the time I could have addressed and stamped them. And that is ok, I think, because  if I have learned anything over this past year, I have learned to prioritize, to make time for what really matters.

Just a few days ago, in one of my classes, our discussion came around to death, and  I shared with my little class the story of how the nurse explained to me how my mom’s death was certain, and the only question left was how I wanted to let her go. My sister and I chose to withdraw the machines and let her die then, with us there, rather than allow the infection to take her slowly over several days as she remained mechanically breathing from a machine.  I shared with them how I sat at her bedside and held her hand as they nurse came in periodically to tell us of her heart beat slowing until she was finally gone, all the while as I could see the snow in the window behind her.

“I don’t see how you could do that,” they said. “I don’t know what I would do if it were my mom,” they replied.

“I couldn’t let her die alone,” I explained.

“Oh, I know,” they confirmed, “but you are telling us the story so calmly.”

“I don’t know that I could have if I hadn’t been there the night before,” I said. “But I am comforted by the fact that our last words to each other were ‘love you, bye.’ I don’t know that I would have been able to live with myself had I not gone to see her that night and sat with her as she watched that horrible Crissily show.” And they all laughed nervously and nodded.

“My mom loves that show,” one of them added.

So, one year later, and the snow is falling again. Yes, I  am certain she is sending the snow, with no worries about bills or dangerous roads, and I am certain she is enjoying watching it fall from above with a view I can only imagine.

Segment 1 – The Day I Said Goodbye Without Knowing It Was Goodbye

My mom passed away on Friday, December 8, 2017, while snowflakes covered our town in the upstate of South Carolina. Snow in South Carolina is rather rare any time of the winter, but especially rare that early in December. I am quite certain she sent the snow from Heaven for my step-dad, to comfort him in the time of greatest loss in his life. He has always loved the snow, loved it more than most people. My mom always worried about getting to work and losing time, but my step-dad preferred to enjoy the fleeting moment of a winter wonderland. So, I am sure she sent him the snow, and she was able to do so because she truly left this world Thursday night, not Friday as stated in the records.

I came to visit my mom in the hospital Thursday evening after a rotten couple of days at work. My sister had called the ambulance Wednesday when her fever rose so high that she began talking ‘out of her head’ and seeing images that no one else could see. She had grown delirious in her fever, and my sister couldn’t help her nor control her anymore. Why had she been allowed to grow so sick, you might ask. Good question. She had visited an urgent care center or her primary care physician twice in the past week where she had received medicine for nausea and more antibiotics. We didn’t know then that the antibiotics would lead to her death.

The emergency room and the patient rooms were full Wednesday, so after treating her in the emergency room, hospital officials tucked her away Wednesday night in a cubby area, a holding space while they waited on a room to be vacated. She was moved into a room Thursday while I was at work, so I headed to the hospital Thursday evening with my husband. We visited with her for a little over an hour. She was watching Chrisley Knows Best and sipping sweet tea every few minutes. She struggled to talk much because her breathing was so labored, and she fidgeted constantly, shifting in the bed and readjusting her seating without resting more than 5 minutes at a time. She could clearly hear us and respond, but she couldn’t talk much because talking took too much of her breath, so Paul, my step-dad answered for her most of the evening. At one point, hospital staff had to change her bed linens because the infection in her colon caused her bowels to act out of control, but we all thought she was expelling the infection. My husband stepped out of the room while they changed the bed sheets, cleaned her, and changed her hospital gown. When he re-entered the room, she said, “Welcome back!”

Marc said “thank you” and then asked me, “Why are they all covered when they come in here? Should we be wearing a mask, too?”

Paul said, “They said she tested negative for the flu, so we should be all right.”

The nurse attending said, “Her chart says she is being tested for flu.”

My husband and I gave each other a wary look; the last thing we needed was to get sick right before Christmas with less than two weeks left in school  – two weeks full of responsibilities for Christmas activities at work and at home. My mom seemed settled again, but she kept drinking tea and moving restlessly in her bed. We talked for a few more minutes, followed along with the TV show that featured silly Christmas antics of Chrisley and her husband, and talked about how ready we were for Christmas break.

About 8:30, I said, “Momma, we have to go to school tomorrow, so we are going to head on out.” She said ok. I said, “I will see you tomorrow. Love you, bye!”

She replied, “Love you, bye!”

That was the last time I saw my mother alive. We left Spartanburg Regional Medical Center and headed down Highway 29 toward Gaffney, the town where we live, which is just about 20 miles north of Spartanburg. We preferred the old highway even with its frequent red lights and speed zones with quick limit changes because Interstate I-85 was a construction mess that often left us sitting instead of driving. On the way down Highway 29, we ran across the most beautifully lit tree I had ever seen. I was so taken back by its beauty that I posted a photo of it on Facebook.

Less than 10 minutes down the road, as we slowed down to ride through the famous Cowpens speed trap, a phone call broke into our Christmas music sampling in my Jeep.

“My sister,” I sighed with frustration. “What does she want?”

I answered the phone, and Marc and I listened through the Jeep speakers. Paul had called Misty. After we left, he had gone to get a pillow to make his bed for the night in her room. When he returned to her room, she was unresponsive. He tried to get her awake, but nothing. He called for help, and they were able to revive her, but she was on a ventilator and sent to Pulminary ICU.

“I just left there, Misty,” I reported, as if my being there had made her account less valid.

“It just happened, Kristie,” she replied with equal frustration.

How could she have gone unresponsive, been revived, and then moved into another section of the hospital in the time it took Marc and me to get from the hospital to Cowpens? 20 minutes, tops?

So, we went home, helped my son get ready for school and dropped him off to stay the night with my mother-in-law, grabbed a jacket and a cup of coffee, and headed back to the hospital. We were not sure if we would need to stay the night, so we prepared for that possibility, but when we arrived at the hospital again, the Pulminary ICU doors were locked. Luckily, I found a door to a stairwell not completely closed, so we sneaked in that stairwell and made our way to her new room. A nurse met us right away and said, “She will be on the ventilator throughout the night. We will run some tests tomorrow, but she will stay just as she is for a while.”

Left with few other options, we returned home and went to work Friday with instructions for my sister to call me as soon as she heard something. I would keep my phone with me, and I would leave school if anything changed. Otherwise, I would return Friday after school. I sent my principals a message, and they agreed to cover my classes if I had to leave suddenly.

Most of the morning Friday passed with no new info. Misty said they were going to do a brain scan to determine if there had been some brain damage from the revival process. Then, some time around 1 pm, I took a call from my sister. “They are going to do emergency surgery. I hope you won’t be mad, but I gave them permission to take out her colon and give her a colostomy bag.”

“Of course, you did, Misty. If that is what they said she needed, then we have to do it. Why would I be mad? I will be there in a few minutes.”

In a whirlwind of activity, my colleagues in my pod took over my classes and helped me exit quickly. My husband picked up my son from school early and dropped him off at our house so he could meet me at the hospital. I rushed toward Spartanburg as the snow covered Interstate I-85.

To be continued….

Segment 2: What I Remembered First

I wrote this part the very next morning, Saturday, December 9,  2017. She had officially and formally passed away Friday evening, and as I sat alone in my recliner in my living room early Saturday morning, as I nearly always do, I thought about what I learned from my mom. Now, this is just a beginning, but these were my first thoughts after watching her pass Friday evening. I will tell the story of Friday later, but I want to record here what I typed into NOTES on my phone that Saturday morning, recorded as of 7:34 am according to my page saved on NOTES.

My mother taught me compassion. She always said that we couldn’t have enough friends in this world, and when I got a little too big for my breeches, she would tell me a story from her childhood – a story about a time when someone stole her doll, which was her only Christmas present, a time someone made fun of her stuttering when the teacher called on her to read in class, a time when the teacher sent a note home about her disheveled hair because she had to get herself ready and her siblings ready for school every morning as her mother had to work third shift and wasn’t there to fix breakfast or to make sure her hair was brushed well enough.  Through these stories I learned to see life from someone else’s perspective, to see how desperately people need to be loved and accepted for exactly who they are.

I remember my mom being friends with people I wouldn’t dare be caught with because I thought they would hamper my social status. I was a pretentious little girl, for sure, but my mom taught me better. She was never concerned with social status; in fact, she was quite offended by it and those who did care about it. She rejected the in-crowd as being too concerned with themselves.

My mom was an original hippie even if she apparently lived a quiet suburban life. She may have worn teased and flipped hair and skirts instead of love beads and jeans, but she spoke of peace and harmony with nature and loving all that is around us. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” she would remind me over and over again when I would hold grudges. And when fights would erupt among family members, she would say it was time to play Henry Kissinger again.

Her understanding of human nature came from a childhood of severe abuse and poverty and being forced to hide their family’s shame because they lived in a culture where a family’s business stayed within the family, and keeping a family in tact meant more than keeping a family healthy and safe. And she lived with the repercussions of that hidden pain for the rest of her life, battled memory demons every day, and struggled to find the very peace she tried to provide for others.

We lived on music when I was a little girl. We bought 45s and piled them high on the center of the turntable, lowered the wooden lid to the console stereo, and twirled and danced and sang until every record dropped.

That is all that I had typed on my phone that morning, but I thought it important to record my very first memories, those images that propelled me the morning after she died. I will pick up with the next segment soon.

Segment 3: Traits Inherited

I woke up several times way too early this morning, as I often do, with a to-do list shaking me from my sleep. I have to go back to teaching Monday, so that leaves me about five days to accomplish all that I set out to accomplish over Christmas break. Some of those items are personal goals, some professional, and some are just responsibilities that do not take a holiday. Marc often asks me, “why do you always have to be doing something?” I think I inherited that nervous energy from my mom.

Now, both of my parents have a relentless work ethic. My dad has never been one to go without a job, and he always preferred trying to fix, improve, or repair items around the house himself. Yet, the constant, nagging need to have accomplished something, to have proven something, to have kept her mind busy and productive throughout the day – that comes straight from my mom.

When I was little and lived across the street from my grandmother, my mom was a homemaker, or a ‘housewife’ as we called them back then. At the time, in the seventies primarily, the social views of homemaking were changing rather quickly. I am not here to debate the value of any of those changes; I just want to paint the picture honestly. Just a few years earlier, the role of a wife and mom who only worked at home would have simply been the expected and natural role of a wife and mom, and work for a woman outside the home was difficult to find. But when I was a little girl, growing up, more and more women were taking jobs outside the home. Often out of necessity, but also as a mark of growing equality and even autonomy, moms of my friends went somewhere to work during the day while we were at school. By the time I was in high school in the late 1980s, a stay-at-home mom almost a status symbol of wealth: my husband makes enough money so that I don’t have to work. So, growing up, I witnessed history first hand, watched how the expectations for women changed, and I listened to all the commentary about the changes made from women on TV and from women in my life – my friends’ moms, women at church, my teachers (who were all women), etc. Again, I am not interested in assigning any value to the old days or old ways as compared to modern times; I leave that for your personal thoughts. I just know what I saw and heard.

What I saw when I was a little girl living across the street from my grandmother was a woman who worked non-stop, who stayed in constant motion, and who was always cleaning, tinkering, creating, and volunteering. Our house was always immaculate. She made the beds every morning. No dirty laundry hamper was allowed to be full. No dry clothes rested in the dryer; in fact, she often stopped the dryer early to see if she could pull out and fold some clothes right away. If she chose to use the clothes line outside, those clothes were hung on the line at nearly dawn and brought in and folded and put away before sundown. I never knew what a dirty tub looked like or what happened if toothpaste stuck to the side of the sink. I never remember seeing dirty dishes in the sink, either. She never allowed us to drink Kool-Aid in the house because she knew that one spill would ruin the carpet. We didn’t have trash pick-up at our house in the county, so she would haul off trash bags the minute they filled up because there is no way she would allow trash to remain sitting at her house.

Her work didn’t keep her inside, either. She kept the grass cut herself, and I learned how to trim bushes with huge metal clippers by watching her keep the bushes in our yard at a respectable height. She was always planting something new – especially azaleas. She was always looking for the most brilliant color of azaleas to adorn our yard. I remember her talking about dogwoods, too, but the holy grail was a blue spruce tree. If she could afford a blue spruce, and if she could get it to thrive here in our nearly tropical humidity and August days of heat so thick one could barely breathe, then she would truly have done something great in her yard. I watched her pull off dead leaves meticulously, bending her head over to inspect each bloom. “If you will pull off the dead ones,” she would tell me, “it will keep blooming.”

Even more remarkable, when I think about all my mother did as a stay-at-home mom, is the reality that she did not simply keep one small house on High Drive. No, she kept up my grandmother’s house across the street, as well. My grandmother worked for more than forty years in the textile industry. She was the first woman shift supervisor ever at Mayfair Mills; she earned the title way too late when the mill decided to start the weekend shift, and when they finally decided a woman could do a supervisor’s job. (The heartbreaking irony here is that my grandmother had to work in the textile mill her entire life to feed her children because she was not married to a man who worked as hard and as honestly as my dad did. Her working life would have been pitied in her day, and her hard work regarded as nearly shameful.)

I am certain my mother learned to clean house the way she did from her mother and her grandmother, just as I did, and my grandmother was in no way soft about keeping a clean house, either. But my mother told me more than once that she felt it her duty to help her mother;  if her mother still had to work while she was able to stay at home, then, the least she could do was help my grandmother with her household chores. So, I often saw her ride our Snapper lawnmower across the street to the big field behind my grandma’s house and cut her grass, too. We often spent the night in my grandma’s ‘yellow room,’ all three of us huddled in bed together when my dad was on the road (my mom, my sister in the middle, and me – all three of us in flannel or cotton night gowns) and when my sister and I went to school, my mom would help my grandma with her laundry after they made us breakfast together, and after they read the Spartanburg Herald-Journal with their morning coffee.

My mom’s energy almost always centered on Misty and me, though. She worked tirelessly to give us the childhood she never had. In our backyard, she built us a remarkable play land. Besides God granting us the most perfect mimosa tree for climbing and playing, my mom secured us a basketball goal, a swing set, a play house, and a sand box. There was no excuse for us to stay indoors, either. She often played basketball with us, and that usually consisted of a game of H-O-R-S-E or randomly taking practice shots, but she was out there with us. When the kids in the neighborhood got together for a softball game, she would be the all-time pitcher for both teams (until a hot one off the bat hit her square in the mouth, causing spurts of blood and swollen lips for days). Sometimes, in the evenings, as the sun set, you might even find her on the swings with us.

It was her idea to research and then purchase a piano for me; I had no idea she was planning for me to take piano lessons until we went to Case Brothers on Pine Street and picked out a beautiful but affordable upright Baldwin. It was her idea to volunteer as an assistant leader for Girl Scouts to ensure that we could find a troop for me, and I can’t begin to explain how influential and valuable my Girl Scout experience was for me. To think that I may never had been taught how to cross stitch or make a baby doll from some cloth, thread, and filling or create and use my own Bunsen burner or cook my first meal from scratch or sleep in a cabin on my own with other Scouts in the Pisgah National Forest – none of it would have happened if my mom hadn’t decided to say, “I will help with the troop.” I nearly lose my breath with gratitude when I think about it.

It was also  her idea to become a health room volunteer at my elementary school, Hendrix Elementary. Back before we had registered nurses in every school, we had health room volunteers, and my mom stepped up again. She attended training from the American Red Cross, purchased the required light blue smocks, and showed up at my school at least one day a week. When she worked in the health room, my sister loved for her to eat lunch with her at the cafeteria, and of course, my mom served as a class mom for our classes, too, providing cupcakes and potato chips for Halloween parties, Christmas parties, and Valentine’s parties. It was also her idea to learn how to keep a score book and join my softball team as the official score keeper, which nearly turned into some kind of coaching position as she took it upon herself to yell at every one of us if we didn’t perform to her expectations. And woe to the team that tried to bat out of order!

I haven’t mentioned that she was a Sunday School teacher and a Vacation Bible School volunteer. I haven’t talked about her talent for interior decorating. I haven’t mentioned her craftiness. Too much for one quick story, and maybe I can explore some of that later. And from all I have written, one may assume that I am exaggerating, painting her as far too good to be true. In no way, however, am I trying to portray my mom as perfect or as a saint, for no one is, and she had her share of faults, but she did do everything within her power to try to make my early childhood as close to perfect as she could make it. The time to examine her faults is later, when I have recorded all that was generous and selfless about her. And as I look back, I can see the true origin of this limitless energy; I know why she worked non-stop. Her drive didn’t necessarily come from a traditional work ethic; her drive was her need to forget and to fix. If she could keep her body moving and keep her mind busy, then maybe the horrifying memories from her own childhood might stay tucked away. If she could work herself into exhaustion at the end of the day, then maybe she could sleep soundly without nightmares or moments where she would lie awake in loneliness. If she could create the perfect image, then maybe she would feel worthy, good enough. Maybe by creating a perfect home for her two girls, she could put a permanent end to the childhood of poverty and abuse she suffered. Her relentless pursuit to forget and to fix was an effort to plug the drain, to keep her life from slipping away into nothingness or worse, a way to save and preserve and keep warm some kind of living water.

And when Misty and I grew to something near self-sufficiency, she found herself with more time, which wasn’t good for her. Time alone in her thoughts allowed those memories and those thoughts of inferiority to seep back in. I can nearly pinpoint the first moments she began to change, and it occurred somewhere around the time I was in sixth grade, which meant my sister was in second grade. We both were busy with school and music lessons or dance lessons or softball practice or Girl Scouts, and she was left alone with her thoughts more and more often. A house can only be cleaned so many times, and a yard can only hold so many flowers. And being left alone with her thoughts meant she couldn’t keep the drain plugged. I imagine she often felt her life and her sanity slipping down that drain. How could she regain control now?

When I woke up this morning with my to-do list spiraling in my head, I thought about my mom. I  wonder if she had similar thoughts when we were lying in bed together in the yellow room, when she would urge us to be quiet and go to sleep so she could do her ‘creative thinking.’ Was her creative thinking a to-do list, a battle plan for the day? And for someone like me, who had a nearly fairy-tale childhood, why do I feel the need to work like she did? Why do I feel the need to fill every moment with some kind of productive accomplishment, some kind of token to prove that I am worthy? Or does it come from that same sentiment she felt for her mom – the idea that if I have the luxury of a very privileged childhood, then don’t I owe it to my mom to make the most of it? To honor her by doing something worthwhile so that her anguish is not wasted, her efforts not spent in vain.