Where've I been?

Depending on what metric you use, either tomorrow or yesterday was the one month anniversary since Mom died. It's also the same length of time, I now realize, since I posted any updates here. Something I've kind of forgotten about until just the last two or three days when, as I'm running into people again and we're talking about my plans for next week, I realize I'm assuming facts not currently in evidence, so to speak.

So I'll get to the current situation first, then skip back to a month ago and try to fill you all in.

It's Wednesday evening as I write this. Thursday evening will be my first curling game of the year (a curiously late start to my season considering how early it had officially started, but that's another story). Friday is a regular day and Saturday Christine and I get on a plane and fly back to the Island for an indeterminate amount of time more than the weekend and less than a full week. Brenda and Steve are going to pick us up and then we'll pick up Mom's car when we get back to Summerside. Gregory has been looking after it for us while we sort out everything else and now seems to be the right time to go pick it up. I expect we'll only be on the Island for a couple of days, we're already booking our time off at Christmas and I'm hoping this will be the time when I can really spend time with everyone back home.

Okay, so back to the first few days following Mom's death. What did I say already? Nothing, I guess.

I knew it was going to happen. Not specifically that Tuesday morning, but I did know it was going to happen soon. I had the feeling on Sunday night when I was getting ready to leave and the nurse, she didn't say it was close, but the words she used were different enough from everything else she'd been saying before that I knew I was right. So I stayed that night. Monday night Gregory and Zita stayed with her and Christine and I went back to Steve and Brenda's place to play some cards and try to get some sleep. My phone rang and I looked at the time on it before I answered it. Six-fifteen exactly, which seemed odd to me at the time. It still does, though I don't know why, except that as I sat in the car to drive over to the hospital I noticed that the clock in the car told me it was 5:20am, which was 6:20am local since we'd never set it to Atlantic time. Five minutes is what it took for both of us to go from complete sleep to in on the road. Not bad considering I also remember very clearly that I didn't feel panicked or anything, Gregory was very calm as he spoke to me -- I'd expect nothing else -- and that calm spread to me. We didn't exactly rush.

Anyway, we were in the room before 6:30am and by then Mom's breathing was very labored. I don't know if she knew we had come in or not, she wasn't really responding to us at all, but I went over all the same and told her Christine and I were there and that we loved her and I gave her a kiss and as much as a hug as I could manage. Basically nothing changed for an hour, then around 7:30am she started to experience apnea. I'd been expecting this too, the book Reverend Paul had given me had prepared me for this, so I didn't worry, I just started counting how long the episodes lasted. The book had said toward the end it might go on as long as a minute without any breathing and then start again and most of these were less than ten seconds.

By about ten to eight the four of us were talking quietly amongst ourselves and the sun was up, lighting the room up a fair bit. Mom had a somewhat westerly exposure with her room, but it was still getting bright enough that we could have had the overhead lights off. I thought about turning them off, I knew they had started to bother her over the last week or so, she liked it darker in the room, but at least the light over her bed was off and having the rest on seemed reasonable since the nurses were going to turn them on again anyway each time they came in. With the sun coming up on what was promising to be a pretty clear day, it seemed like a moot point anyway. So Gregory, Zita and Christine were chatting, I was making my usual distracted, polite noises while I started the mental stop-watch each time Mom stopped breathing and right around 8:02am the stop-watch rolled past the 45-count, which I'm sure was more than an actual minute, when I told Christine that I thought it was time to get a nurse and that I thought she was gone.

So things that stand out in my memory about those two hours is the time on the face of my phone (my pink phone, a funny for anyone in on the joke, not really worth explaining if you're not) telling me it was 6:15am, the clock in the car telling me I'd been awake five minutes, give or take, the clock on the wall in Mom's purple hospital room saying it was 8:02am when I concluded we were one less. There's one more thing. While I was counting that last time the sky clouded over. As I was sending Christine out into the hall it was getting quite dark. By the time the nurse came in it was raining outside. And by about 8:30am we had seen the last of the rain we would see for the next few days. So, yeah. Out of the blue morning sky it started raining when my mother died. That's the way it was supposed to be.

Y'know, I want to keep going, but I think I'll stop there. That's a good place. I'll turf the rest of this post for now and I'll put it in the next post, maybe for tomorrow night. I'm curling at 9:00pm, which means it'll be a surprise if I get home before midnight, realistically I'll be home around 12:30-12:45am (we never have just one round after a game, despite all being grown men with day jobs, but I also need to space them out a fair bit because I'm not completely irresponsible). So that means I'll either get the update done early tomorrow evening or not until Friday. Stay tuned, I'm back.