My mother passed away on Friday morning at 6:30 a.m.

But first, thank God, there was Thursday.

That was the day that I came into her hospital room and there she was, sitting up in the bed, smiling and talking to the aide. After days of being pretty much unresponsive, unseeing, and with only fleeting smiles on her face, here she was, talking and smiling! 

“Hi,” she said to me. “This is very, very strange.”

Hospice had given me a little booklet about death, in which there was a section called What to Expect for the last days before death is imminent. Often, it said, just before the end comes, people rally. They sit up in bed. They invite people over for dinner. They chat about old times. I remember reading that little piece of information days before and thinking, “Impossible!” And yet, there was my mother, commenting on the strangeness of everything.

“What is strange?” I said. I sat down next to her and took her hand. I felt so happy to get to talk to her again.

“Dying,” she said. “It’s so much harder than I thought it would be.”

“I know, it’s very hard,” I said.

Then she settled down and closed her eyes. After a few minutes she said, “Please tell me your name.”

But–here’s the thing: it wasn’t as though she didn’t know my name. She wanted me to say it.

I said, “My name is Sandi,” and she got a big smile on her face. She said, “Oh, such a pretty, pretty name.”

“You gave me that name,” I said, and she smiled again.

“Pretty, pretty name. Pretty girl.”

We sat there together for a long time. She kept saying that my name was pretty. I told her about how her dog, Bear, was doing, and what the weather was like. I told her that Jim, my husband, was on his way–as was her brother Butch and his fiancee, Dixie, and Butch’s daughter, Stacy, and her husband Bill. Reinforcements! Family members to gather around the bed! No more need for the hospice people and nurses to come in the room and see me sitting there and say, ”Oh, honey, are you all alone with this? Do you need some support?”

And so it was that everybody came a few hours later, and we gathered around the bedside. My Uncle Butch is funny and so is my husband, and we all talked and laughed and told stories. We gave her a foot massage. We kissed her over and over again, and she squeezed our hands and smiled. She settled back into the quiet sleep state she had mostly been in for days. I asked her if she was in pain, and she whispered, “No.”

A minister came and said the 23rd Psalm, and she moved her mouth, as though she were trying to say it, too. Butch and Dixie and Stacy and Bill and Jim and I went out to dinner. We went to a place where I had once gone, a year ago, with my mother and eaten crab legs and key lime pie. She had gotten so full that night that she had to go sit outside because she couldn’t bear to see anybody eating food anymore, and when I came outside later, she laughed and said, “I see you survived.”

After dinner, we went back to the hospital, and I was shocked at how much she had changed in just that few hours. She was sleeping with her mouth open now, and she looked hollowed out. She didn’t move when we told her goodnight. Her breath made a rattling sound now. I kissed her goodbye, and she was hot to the touch, spiking a fever.

The next morning I woke up at 6:30 and lay there in bed, thinking about her. And then the phone rang, and the hospice worker said she had just passed away. I called Butch, and we all went back to the hospital and said prayers around her bed, and held hands and kissed her goodbye.

I am okay. Sad, but okay. And very much moved by all the comments and love and support coming through to me.

There have been many funny and moving and sad moments, many conversations with people who loved my mother and many who want to tell me stories about her. It’s been nice to be with my family members again. There are things I shall write about later on, when I have sorted them all out. Right now I’m sitting in a Panera, where they have a wireless connection, and I am on my way home from the memorial service.

I would like to say one thing: there is humor to be found, even in these times. In the hospital room, after my mother was gone, we had to ask her roommate if she wouldn’t mind turning down the ever-present television set. She agreed, and the minister said the prayers. We held hands and listened.

And then just as he finished, the TV set suddenly blared back to life, and from the speaker came the theme song to The Jeffersons TV show…”Moving on up!”

You couldn’t arrange that, even if you tried.

Much love to you all!