Too Close To Tell

Trish had to leave this morning and even though I find it kind of hard to believe, I think that was the hardest part of this whole experience so far.

I think maybe I need to back up a bit, I don't know quite what all I've written about so far, so I'll try to hit the important stuff. She got here on Thursday afternoon and we visited with Mom for a bit, then went out for food and a couple of drinks, then came back to the hospital for a while. I was so happy to have that little bit of social time even in the middle of all of the stuff that's going on right now.

I've never been a brother before but immediately I felt like I was sitting beside a family member. Which wouldn't be surprising, I guess, except that twelve years ago I was an only child and now I have an older sister. We haven't talked anywhere near as much as we should have since Mom and her made contact again and over the last few days together we found out that both of us had the same, mistaken ideas that created that situation. I kept thinking that she's an adult, she's had a family, she's married and got children of her own now, she doesn't need me coming along and complicating matters any. Part of that came from me knowing that Mom and her were not getting along all the time, too. The reunion was difficult for many reasons and I didn't want to add to the difficulties by trying to brother up the situation any.

Anyway, she told me she had been thinking the same sorts of things and I wish I could say we had a laugh about it but right now all we can both think is how much time we lost and how much Mom wanted to be there to do things together with us. All we can do now is try to make sure we don't lose the connection we've made. That, and we talked to Mom so she knows that now that we've met we're getting along great and we're both going to do our best to be family from now on.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

Yeah, so, sitting at the bar, hanging out with my sister and my brother-in-law, Jim, felt more natural than I ever would have imagined. She got a splinter off the table and while we were all taking turns trying to get it out her boys were texting her and all she could talk about was how much the splinter hurt and how she needed to get it out but we didn't have tweezers or a pin or anything and it was too deep for any of us to get with our fingernails. It felt so great to just share a normal moment with her I had to write it down. That's another one of those things I want to make sure I never forget.

Friday was, as I mentioned, a bad day.

I'll characterize it that way, but I'll also say that there were good things that came out of it. Trish cornered Monica early in the morning, asking her tough questions that I wish I'd known to ask and even though the end result was us feeling that the best thing we could do would be to turn off Mom's IV and just let her go, and even though we felt that she probably wouldn't live through the weekend, Trish also did accomplish the single best thing for Mom in ages. She insisted that Monica bring in Dr. Kelly (I think, it's pronounced the same even if I have the spelling wrong, which I think I do), the Palliative Care doctor here. He's been on vacation for the last two weeks but he returned on Monday and so on Friday Monica agreed to ask him to look at Mom's case and consult, I guess. I'll get back to that in a bit, too. For now I'll say it seemed like a small victory, but it was an important one.

Friday afternoon we went out to get something to eat, I called Christine and then we went back to the hospital. It was close to 7:00pm before we considered leaving at all -- none of us were hungry at all -- but when we did we drove down to Cavendish and thought we'd just get ice cream instead of a meal. I didn't know it when I suggested it, but this was one of the things that Mom had wanted to do with us, she wanted to take Trish and I down to the boardwalk, get some Cow's ice cream and walk along the beach together. When we came back to the hospital Jim and Trish dropped me off while they went back to Janet's to pick up a pillow for Mom and I told her what we had been doing, just sort of as a way of talking to her and letting her know things were going well between us. That's when she said that she'd hoped we could do that together and she was glad we all had a good time. I know we'll never get to all of the things she would have suggested we do together, but I also know we'll get to a lot of them, since I know a lot of what she would have wanted to do with us.

Anyway, I think I've covered a lot of Saturday already, Christine drove to Fredericton and spent the night there with her family while Tropical Storm Danny blew through, and Trish, Jim and I went out to get some dinner then came back to the hospital and just sat around the room chatting until fairly late in the evening. Mostly just little things, sharing stories about our lives and friends and such, but there were a few things that I remember standing out. We talked a bit about Trish's father (probably won't come up here again, but you never know when I get into our pictures) and we talked a lot about the difficulties her and Mom had over the past ten or twelve years (less likely to come up here again, but I wanted to make a note that I'd remember later when I come back to this). One of the things that had come up, though, was that Trish wanted to have a chat with Mom, just the three of us, and really let her know, both of us, that we were doing well and that everything was going to be okay with us, that she was leaving us in a good place and that we loved her. She also wanted a bit of time to talk to her alone to tell her how she felt.

I went home Saturday night and Dad was still up so I stood around in the kitchen chatting with him for a bit. Made myself a coffee and we were having a conversation about Mom and about treatment and about his day when my phone started to ring. As completely irrational as it sounds now, when I saw it was Trish calling me I felt sick right away. I was sure Mom had died and the hospital had called Janet or something and she was calling to tell me. It wasn't, but it was close. She had been beating herself up over not having the courage to talk to Mom about what she was feeling when we had a quiet period on Saturday afternoon and she wanted to know if I thought it was a good idea if we tried to get her first thing in the morning on Sunday. I think at first I was just too relieved to say anything. She told me that she'd been feeling like Mom had been distant with her and that if Janet hadn't told her that Mom had been saying how much she wanted her there, she would have wondered if she was even welcome. I tried to explain what I'd seen of Mom the days before she got home, though, and that right now Mom couldn't start a conversation at all, she just didn't have the strength but that I knew she wanted both her children with her now because she'd been asking about Trish so much earlier in the week. We decided that first thing in the morning on Sunday we'd sit down, alone, with Mom and just tell her everything we thought we needed her to know.

Again, I'm really not doing this justice, I can't put into words how it felt then to be talking on the phone with my sister about giving our dying mother words of comfort that her kids were going to be okay. It was agonizing to be talking about it, but it felt good and natural in a way I can't explain. I'm not the only one, I've said in reference to my sister quite a few times, but now I'm really believing it, I guess.

I'm going to wrap this up now and finish it later, I think. It gets better, but it also gets worse and right now, sitting in Mom's darkened hospital room on a sunny Tuesday afternoon with her snoring softly in the bed and Christine reading silently at my side, I can't tell how it is right now. It's not a good day, but maybe it's okay.