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"I'm so glad you called."
I could hear the smile in her voice, but I was not prepared to hear those words or the tone she used.
I knew something was up, but she didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask.
Mom spoke to me with a warmth and presence that she had never given me in my entire life. Something was wrong, but she gave no hint about what it might be.
I was alarmed but had no concrete reason to think anything was wrong. She had no complaints. She listened as I shared about watering my plants and my week.
I cut the call short because I felt uncomfortable and didn’t want the elephant in the room to make any noise.
I didn’t want to think about what her change in demeanor might mean.
My internal alarm system went off again a few days later but from an unexpected source.
I was working in the hospital’s infusion room when a familiar song played on the radio. My colleague and I were curious to know who sang it.
We couldn’t figure it out, so Bob wrote down some of the lyrics and handed them to me.
“Here, look it up.”
It was odd that he would take the time to write down the lyrics, but I typed them into the computer anyway.
Seasons in the Sun, by Terry Jacks. A one-hit wonder. Now it made sense why neither of us knew who he was.
Reading through the lyrics, I realized it was about someone dying.
How sad, I thought.
My insides clenched ever so slightly. I pushed aside the feeling. I didn’t want to investigate why I reacted that way.
When I saw my sister’s name near the end of the lyrics, my insides clenched again, and a slight alarm went off in my heart as the hair rose on the back of my neck.
“Goodbye Michelle, my little one; you gave me love, and helped me find the sun”
Photo by author, St. Simon’s Island, Georgia
It was time for lunch, so I closed the computer and went to the lunchroom.
No sooner had I sat down than my phone rang. It was Angela. Something had to be wrong.
She never called.
When I answered, she choked up as she put her mother on the phone. Aunt Carol informed me of my mother’s condition, and then added,
“Dr. Levy said, if she has family, tell them they should come.”
Mom was dying.
I left work and prepared to drive to Georgia. I knew in my gut she was on her way out, as the song played in my head.
Had she warned me with that song, all the way from Georgia?
“Goodbye my friend it’s hard to die”
We weren’t exactly friends. Or were we getting there and now it was too late?
We hadn’t talked much for almost ten years until she had had a short hospitalization the previous October.
My dad had insisted that I call her. I protested and refreshed his memory that she didn’t care if I called.
She had always seemed uninterested in knowing anything about her children or grandchildren. She never called or asked about them.
She was fighting her own battles from childhood traumas and didn’t want any witnesses.
“She’s still your mother.”
He reminded me.
Thus began my Sunday calls to her. Every week was the same. I called, and she answered.
I asked about her recovery, and how she was feeling, and ensured she was taking her medicines correctly.
The calls never lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes and always felt a little forced. Very seldom did we laugh.
She seemed slow to recover. The episode in October had drained her more than I had realized. It was July and she still was not nearly where I expected her to be.
She seemed to be going in the opposite direction.
I didn’t know that it wasn’t a slow recovery.
She was slowly dying.
I arrived in Georgia the following morning, dreading what I would see.
While I waited for my sisters to arrive, I went into the intensive care unit.
The room was quiet except for the rhythmic pulsing of the breathing machine. All manner of tubes and infusion lines invaded her body.
She didn’t stir when I bent to kiss her forehead and told her I loved her, and that it was okay.
I told her I was sorry we didn’t have more time to heal our relationship and that I understood it was time for her to go.
Stillness.
Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash
My sisters arrived, and the four of us entered the room.
Mom sat straight up and gasped in shock that all her children were there.
Eyes still closed, she lay back down and remained still.
It was stunning.
The doctor was ready to see us.
We listened to his report in the stillness of the small conference room.
His news was grave.
He explained that Mom had just undergone emergency surgery to repair a ruptured gut. I knew it was due to years of alcohol and diet soda; her self-medications of choice for her deep, unhealed wounds of childhood trauma.
Dr. Levy told us that, according to the surgeon, she came through the surgery with flying colors. Yet, within ten minutes of removing her from the respirator, she went into respiratory arrest.
He explained,
“Her lungs are weak due to emphysema, and the strain of the surgery was too much.”
So they had to put her back on the respirator. The surgeon seemed to have some expectation that she would eventually be able to breathe on her own again and would recover.
Dr. Levy knew otherwise. Respiratory failure wasn’t her only problem.
She had stage-four metastatic breast cancer.
“Even if her lungs recovered from the surgery, she would only have at best, three or four weeks to live. Chemotherapy won’t save her.”
I knew he was right.
Having worked for many years in the critical care unit at the level 2 trauma center, I knew when someone was dying.
All the signs were there: maxed out on blood pressure support meds, unresponsive without any sedation or pain medication. She was going. It was just a matter of time.
She remained the same for the four days we were there.
We had no idea when she would transition and there was talk about long-term care. We all had to get back to our lives and went home to await the news of her passing.
The following Wednesday night the nurse called to tell me Mom was at the end of the critical care support phase and they needed to transition her to long-term care, and wanted our permission to proceed.
My sisters and I knew that’s not what she wanted. Given that we all agreed, the medical team decided to allow her more time on the ventilator and medications and let nature run its course.
After the call, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
I wailed.
It was the most painful day of my life.
Two days later, Aunt Carol called to let me know that Mom had passed quietly, with her and Aunt Marsha by her side.
When I called my dad to inform him of her passing, I didn’t expect his response.
“Huh, that’s about the time I said goodbye to her while I was driving to Rhode Island for work.”
Another coincidence?
According to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, unlikely.
“First, they must give the person permission to die, and second they must reassure the person they will be all right after he or she has gone, and that there is no need to worry about them.”
Mom had waited for Dad to acknowledge her before she left. As soon as he did, she let go.
In our culture, we tend not to believe we can communicate on a non-physical, soul level, but we do it all the time without even realizing it.
Have you ever thought of someone and then the phone rang, or they texted you? That’s our psychic abilities working without our conscious intention, it just happens. Yet, we brush it off as a coincidence.
I don’t believe in coincidences.
In my experience, when a person is dying, they are super-conscious. They can communicate long distances instantaneously to get a message to a loved one, as my mother did when she was leaving and couldn’t verbally tell me. In the realm of spiritual consciousness, there is no time or distance. It is instantaneous. Quantum.
Did my Mom send that song (with help from the Spirit world?) to alert me that she was dying?
I found out years later from my sister Michelle, that she would sing Seasons in the Sun to our mom on their daily phone calls. I had no idea when I looked up those lyrics that day at work.
Learning that it was a special song between Mom and Michelle left no doubt that it was a message sent from my mother as she was imminently dying.
How could that be a coincidence?
Mom knew she was going. She had warned me twice. She signaled to me she was dying when she spoke to me with that loving tone that had been missing my whole life. Then, a few days later, she sent me her special song on the radio and nudged my co-worker to bring it to my attention.
Mom couldn’t talk with us about her abuse as a child. She couldn’t be present as a mother, and she couldn’t seek help.
But before she left this earth, as often happens when people are dying, she made her amends by letting me know she did love me after all.
“I’m so glad you called.”
“Do not overlook tiny, good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water, in the end, will fill a huge vessel.”
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