Don’t Rest in Peace, Mom

A year after my mom was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer and given a year to live, she and I had a small “party” honoring her stubbornness and refusal to allow her doctor to be correct.

I made a small yellow cake, chocolate frosting — it was my favorite she used to make me. She could only eat a bite as by that time I was feeding her just bites at a time. She had no appetite — the massive amounts of morphine I gave her throughout the day/night made certain she threw up every bite.

Even water was hard to keep down by then. She took her bite of the cake though and, because she was a mother, complimented me and said she would like to eat the whole thing.

Most of the bite she took was still on the fork.

She laid back — I had sat her up but even those few moments were tiring by then, and she smiled.

Her smile always melted my will, calmed my heart, and loved my soul. It was fleeting then, the pain pushing her smile back. But I saw it and held it in my mind even as her beautiful face showed the effects of a year of cancer treatment for a cancer that was all over her body. It was everywhere as it knew to take her it would have to destroy all of her.

She was small, having lost half her body weight by now.

Her golden skin now ironically brown as if the cancer wanted to break free of her and show the world it was winning.

It would win.

She held it off, though, for six more months — Painful, heartbreaking, lifetaking, god-hating, family ignoring months, and just two of us alone in the darkness of our universe.

All day and brutally all night as she screamed in pain and for medication that by now was painful morphine suppositories gently guided by me in the middle of the night.

Waiting for her to fall asleep and seeing her in the dark, still, frail, joining with the darkness.

Her light dim and dimming.

The last six months were unspeakably terrible, the slow ripping away of life, the shearing of love, the separation of soul from body, of mother from child.

By the end I wanted it to end for her.

And me.

She did not deserve the hell that god, the Universe, or whatever whoever put her through cancer.