Author photo of Mom’s High School Graduation picture
Death – the alternate reality
“Lorazepam.”
That word rattled my brain and took me right back to my Mom’s death in 2021.
I tried to snap back into the present moment, as I was in the middle of a visit with a dying friend. She apologized for her mental fog.
“I hate the meds…they make me so fuzzy…but it helps. Something with an L…”
A family member sitting nearby said, “Lorazepam,” and explained it helped calm my friend’s agitation.
I remembered the drug, and knew the emotional place they were in — the concern about: “Should you give it?” …”How much?”…”How often?”…”Is it too soon?”… “Am I causing harm?”
There’s no question that modern hospice practices are a blessing for the dying and their family. But the dying process itself has its own struggles. After a lifetime of always focusing on healing someone, now you have to wrap your head around helping them die. We spend our lives encouraging our sick family members to eat, take vitamins, and see the doctor. Then at the end, you have to do a rapid reversal and stop giving food, ease off liquids, and stifle every impulse to offer a medical intervention. It’s the right thing to do, but it goes against every instinct we’ve been trained to follow, and it’s even harder if you’ve spent your life as a medical professional trying to heal people.
As I walked back to my car, the word Lorazepam pounded in my brain. Yes. That was the first hospice medication I had to administer to my Mother as she was dying.
It all came back as if it were yesterday. Mom’s discomfort. The meds. Her prayer in her semi-conscious state:
“Help me, Mother Angelica…”
***
Can you hold the pain from a lifetime of emotional distance and hurt, along with your empathy and love for that person, and care for them as they die?
The shit-show
Maybe it was in keeping with the hand that life dealt my Mother that her death process was doomed to be difficult. In terms of getting much assistance from her local hospice, it was a shit-show from the start, even though it wasn’t their fault.
It was Wednesday night, March 7, 2013, about 7 pm. We were heading home in the morning. I had completed my part in “Dad’s death process,” honorably. But at the moment, he was being a real bastard to the young hospice nurse, and we needed to calm him down. So we headed back to the hospice facility.
How long’s this gonna take?
He had early dementia and was dying of stomach cancer. His care had become too much for Mom to keep him at home anymore, and his end was getting close. So, my husband and I had traveled to their home in Pennsylvania to help my Mother move him into a local hospice there.
The Maria Hall Hospice facility was a peaceful place, located on the grounds of the Motherhouse for the Catholic order of nuns there — the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in Danville, PA. My Mother’s sister had belonged to that order before she died years earlier in a tragic car accident. For the last several years, my parents had been living nearby in a retirement community run by that same order of nuns.
In his typical fashion, he was being difficult to the end. When we moved him in on Monday, he glared at me from his chair and said,
“Well, what do I do now?”
I suggested rest.
On Tuesday, as he lay there, he looked up at me and asked,
“So, how long’s this gonna take?”
As kindly as I could, I simply said, “Well, Dad, I don’t know. That’s between you and God.”
Self-portrait by the author, shortly before the illnesses and deaths of her parents
For most of my adult life, I was the warrior. Strong against him because I needed to be. I tried to get him to go for help. He wouldn’t. I was forced to draw a line in the sand to protect our kids.
But emotions are never so clear-cut, and life was always a pendulum between walking away and maintaining some kind of extended family relationship for our son’s sake, and… let’s be honest, mine, too. Because unless someone has no redeeming qualities — in which case it’s easy to walk away and never look back — if that person has also “done good things at times,” and used the powers of intermittent love and trauma bonding on you since infancy, it’s a lot more complicated.
I tried for “middle path” – allowing love, but standing guard. I was determined to be strong, and never again be that “trapped, weak, passive victim from the past,” nor let any one else be put in that same position. And yes, at that point I judged my younger self harshly and with no love.
But it all grew exhausting. As I got older and life had battered me over the decades, my husband noted that my self-portrait above bore a resemblance to a battle-weary soldier’s thousand-yard stare. I kept pushing me, but at the same time, a question I kept shoving to the back of my brain haunted me:”What happens when I am no longer strong?”
In my first “baseline reading,” I spoke of emotional flashbacks. But, another fairly frequent “trauma companion” is nightmares. I’ll share more about them later, but as part of this “baseline,” I will give some background here.
While decades of therapy have healed much, nightmares still show up fairly often. Having dealt with them for years, I am *almost* used to them — at least most of the time. And generally, I shed their emotional upsets pretty quickly. In fact, in some of my recent ones, I even show up more as a fighter now than as that victim from the past. So, I guess that is progress.
But sometimes a nightmare will come along that can still blindside me with an emotional knock-out punch. That’s an indication that there is something I still need to work on because nightmares reveal where the heart is still bleeding.
The Trigger: Trip Planning
Yesterday I set up travel plans for us to go to visit our son in Savannah to celebrate my 70th birthday. Now it should be a short story — decide to go, settle the dates, make travel and hotel reservations, and then go and have a wonderful time. Yes. Maybe for many, that is the way it works. But…
For years I have struggled to “ask,” whether it be for help, for something I want, for some I need. It’s taken years but I am getting better at it. Yet even when I can now ask, I still struggle to feel I “deserve.”
So it was no small thing for me to say that I wanted this trip for my birthday. In fact, it was a major victory. I wasn’t interested in presents or big parties, just being with my immediate family — my treasure in life. But about that whole “I deserve” thing….
Photo by author, of her lab manuals over the years
Before I could create my toolkit, I needed to have a handle on the full scope of the challenge.
Writing is the heavy lifter of excavating the wisdom….but what do you do when you can’t feel…when you can’t reach the emotions locked away…when you may not even realize the emotions are there?
And worst of all…even if and when you can get at them, what do you do when they so overwhelm you with pain and intensity that you are rendered mute in your trauma…you literally cannot find the words to fully express and release what is flooding through you?
That is where I started this journey. And so many times I just walked away because I didn’t know what to do. It felt almost impossible. I say “almost,” only because I had been here before in life and I knew there was a way to bring order to chaos – that whole “Pick a nipple” experience decades earlier.
Thumbing through that tan notebook from my son’s infancy, its pages starting to come loose, I felt hope that I could find the right way to do this, that an organic structure would suggest itself.
Certainly, this book couldn’t be like writing a nonfiction “how-to” book. Nor was it a “sit-at-the-computer-open-a-vein-and-it-would-all-neatly-come-pouring-out” process. It needed to run wild before it could show me how to proceed. But even “running wild,” needed some boundaries.
I wandered around the house and stopped in front of the ham radio receiver from the WWII tank that my Dad used for years. I stared at it on the shelf, played with the dials. Tactile memories stirred. And yes, there is the question: “Why do I have that WWII tank radio receiver in the first place?” That was no small clue.
The music on my laptop drifted in. Songs from 1965, 1966, and 1969 brought me right back into those years. One particular one came on. Several nerves twitched. Suddenly I was 12 on a violent Sunday afternoon, cowering in my bedroom.
A copy of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World was on the next shelf — one of my treasured 1960s Scholastic Book Services purchases that I’d kept. Again…why did I hunt these books down — these very editions? Why did I need them?
Carefully opening the book, I shoved my face right into the middle, right against the pages and inhaled deeply. I just love the smell of books from the 1960s — the ink, the paper, the age. They don’t smell like that anymore. But as I took in that sensory moment, I was back in 7th grade at Sacred Heart School on a fall afternoon, trying to sneak past the nun who told me to stay after school.
Each item on that shelf — smelling it, feeling it in my hands — generated a force that surged through me, as if these objects were Talismans infused with the power to take me back and reveal secrets I’d long forgotten or locked away. Talismans. That is exactly what they were. Objects of power to open a door.
To Tame the Chaos, Will “Pick a Nipple” Work This Time?
I made my peace with the decision to write, and answered the questions, “Why now?” and “For whom?” So all I needed to do was tell the story, right? But…which parts? In what order? To mean exactly what?
I started this process overwhelmed with chaos. Lists of questions, a lifetime of details, photos, and journals, many paintings from the last several years, objects from a lifetime…simply an abundance of material that seemed worse than herding cats.
The dilemma: HOW do I make a story out of this? A story that shows what happened, how I came back, and what I have discovered, all while telling it in a way that matters to readers. Because ultimately, this is a story for all of us.
In times of greatest stress, we fall back on what we know. For me, that is lists, maps, lab techniques, details, and art. Yes, an odd mix of left and right brain tools.
Let’s start with “lab techniques.” Probably one of the most stressed-out times of my life was as a new Mom trying to figure out how to “pick a nipple.”
“Why write…now?” Three simple words, but a vital question that demands an answer to the motive for my change of heart.
Dr. Edith Eva Eger, in her 2017 book, The Choice, about her experiences both as a Holocaust survivor and a psychotherapist, talks about the question, “Why now?” Whenever she was confronted with a new patient, her approach was always the same–questions. I loved her description:
“Why now?…This was my secret weapon. The question I always ask my patients on a first visit. I need to know why they are motivated to change. Why today, of all days…Why is today different from yesterday, or last week, or last year? Why is today different from tomorrow?”
But before I can even answer why I would write now, I need to answer the question that came before it: “Why write?” I had actually tried three times before to write something about sexual abuse, wanting to help someone else in the same situation. I tried articles for adults, a picture book for small children, a chapter book for older kids. No matter what I did, it didn’t come out right. The message was wrong…missing…useless. What could I tell a child that might help their situation? “Go tell an adult, and they can help you.” First, I am not a therapist. And second, if I said that, would I be opening them up to a world of more hurt with a simplistic answer?
Even when professionals try to intervene, there are no guarantees that it will be better. Sometimes if a child tells, they risk breaking up their family, retribution for speaking, possibly being removed from the home and put in foster care, or maybe ending up in a worse situation. If authorities remove the offending parent, the entire family’s financial stability might be at risk. I so wanted to make a useful contribution. But what message could I give to anyone?
The alarm hasn’t yet gone off, but I am awake. I’ve been so since about 5:30, like many mornings. The oblivion of sleep, its escape from reality, at least on the nights I have no nightmares, is over. While my regular blanket keeps me groggy and warm, the weight of the other blanket starts pressing me into the mattress. It is the heavy sensation of feeling scared, hopeless, and like I have done something wrong and will soon be in trouble. I neither want to stay in bed nor get up. I wish I could just sleep in oblivion all day. Getting up means facing another day of writing, struggling to live with the pain it releases, and holding the chaos I feel inside.
I get up anyway, because by now, in my 7th decade, I know that this is part of my life, my existence, at least for the time being. Even as I felt great last night, felt ready to take on the world, yet again, this morning, the black cloud was there to greet me when my eyes opened and consciousness returned. But life has taught me that, like the weather, everything eventually changes. You just have to wait long enough. So for now, I just focus on my “routine.”
The routine. It is something I had to create after I retired from teaching at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. When I was working, I didn’t have time to feel all of this. I had to get up, get moving, battle traffic, and then revel in the last job of my life — which was my total joy.
As promised, here is the second half of my rules for this memoir. These will be right at the front of the book so the reader is also clear about what I have in mind.
Caveats, cautions, and purpose
Before departing on this journey, here are 7 key points:
A moment before continuing the story, to state the “rules of the road” for this book
Before continuing with posts about my life, I want to share what I think is a vital part of any memoir – stating the rules, goals, and cautions for the book. So this is the first of a 2-part set of posts that will form the introduction to my memoir. That introduction will give all readers clear information about the how and why of my approach.
The “hows and whys” of my writing
Since there are so many good books on how to write a memoir, mine does not and will not be a textbook on all the nuances, methods, and rules.
But the following things jumped out at me as I studied all the different books on the subject. So I wrote myself some clear guidelines:
Soul Mosaic 