The beginning of the end

Thoughts on my mum's passing

Today marks the beginning of the end. A year ago, my mum was now undergoing surgery, a surgery that would go from ‘much better than expected’, in the words of her surgeon, to me losing my mum at thirty-eight.

When I look back on those seventeen days in the ICU, where my mum got from good to bad to losing half a leg to a mostly conscious state and finally improving to having multiple organs fail, the words ‘emotional whiplash’ never not echo through my head.

I’m a pivoter, I always have been, but if pivoting had been an Olympic sport, I might very well be owning at least a silver medal right now.

I’m still walking her to the operating room, seeing in her eyes she’s never been more afraid in her life (because she knew, she absolutely knew). I’m still standing outside our local library talking to the surgeon how well it all went. I still have her on the phone at 10 p.m. that same day, in more pain than she’s ever experienced, as they’re prepping her for more surgery, telling her I love her and I’ll see her soon.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you so much.

I’m still being called at 2 a.m. with bad news, and again five hours later, with even more bad news. I’m still being whisked away with my brother to a private room to be told in no uncertain terms that she’s dying and they need to amputate her leg, now, and how do we think our mum would feel about that?

I could go on because that wasn’t the last surgery and that definitely wasn’t the last bad news, the last decision that needed making that was never actually our decision to make.

I’ve never been more aware that I’m a soul having a human experience than I was during those seventeen days at the ICU.

Somewhere between the third and fourth surgery (or was it the fourth and fifth?), feeling incredibly useless, intolerably helpless, I decided to send my mum some Reiki. I’ve talked about this before, but my mum wasn’t a fan. Of Reiki, of anything spiritual really. She’d survived cancer so often before succumbing to whatever shitshow this was that she’d always joke about having multiple angels perked on her shoulders, but that’s about where that ended.

I’m a sucker for consent, so I told myself I’d at least try to make the connection. If she wasn’t having it, if she didn’t want me to send her any healing, I’d stop immediately.

Half a second, give or take. That’s how long it took before I felt her. She wasn’t in her body. She wasn’t even near her body. In fact, she was so far removed from her body that my dad was there, trying to make sure she wouldn’t turn around and start walking towards the light.

It affirmed what my brother, who’s not even remotely spiritual, had said the moment we’d stepped into her room that morning: ‘She isn’t even here.’

At one point, my dad and I had to join forces to keep her focused on her body and from realising the husband she’d lost nearly three decades prior was right behind her, trying to convince her it wasn’t her time and that her kids still needed her.

It took her thirty-six hours and another surgery to return to her body. At the time, even though her condition was incredibly bad – ‘very critical but stable’ is what the doctors kept calling it – the worst of it had passed. Her soul clearly seemed to think so.

Throughout the next couple of weeks, our connection remained open. I felt my dad (his energy, his soul, whatever you want to call it) move further and further away as she seemed to improve. I kept sending her Reiki in between visits, treating her directly (and covertly) when in the room with her.

Things felt stable. Her soul wasn’t going anywhere, at one point I no longer felt my dad around, and I took it to mean she was on the mend, that we were heading in the right direction. She was awake from time to time and mostly responsive, and there was even talk of removing her ventilator so she could speak with us again.

(Now I’m writing this, I can’t help but wonder whether my dad knew ‘I got her’ and his presence was no longer vital. Then again, for all I know he was busy hanging up balloons and painting signs because he knew he’d be welcoming her back into the fold soon.)

The latter never happened. Two weeks after that first surgery, she suddenly started deteriorating again. Her vitals went down, her medication went up, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. My phone kept blowing up (the first thing I did after the funeral was change my ringtone because I never ever wanted to hear that sound again) and they repeatedly told us to come to the hospital and prepare for the worst.

At that point, my mum was no longer conscious. They kept her sedated on purpose, but it was pretty clear that even without that specific drug, the chances of her waking up were pretty slim. But as she was lying in that hospital bed that last weekend, completely still except for her chest, I felt her gear up for a fight. I remember telling one of my aunties – the auntie I can tell things like this to – that I kept feeling she was preparing herself for the fight of her life.

And it was. My mum’s always been stubborn, has always been a fighter, and she wasn’t just going to roll over now. She’d been surprising the ICU staff for weeks, she was just that tough, that resilient.

But here’s what I learned when she finally lost that fight. She wasn’t ready. Her soul wasn’t ready. Her body was done, it was literally failing as I sat next to her, holding her hand, surrounded by my uncles and aunts. I could see it on the screen that monitored her everything. There was no turning back from this. I knew it before her final lab results came in, the ones that told the doctors it was time to turn off the machines.

That entirety of that last afternoon, I felt her desperation, her frustration that her body was losing and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop where this was so clearly going. I’d always thought we’d pass on when it was our time, when we’d done what we came to do here on this earth, that there was a divine timing to our deaths, but that belief crumbled as I went through the motions with her.

Eventually, near the end of that afternoon, I felt her surrender. Reluctantly, and because it was the only thing left to do. Not because she wanted to. She gave it up to her doctors, to the nurses that kept running in and out of her room, administering more and more drugs as her body slipped further away.

She didn’t want to die. She wasn’t at peace with it. On a soul level, she was not at peace with it, and I didn’t know that was a thing. I’d always assumed it would be the incarnated part of us that would struggle to let go when the time arrived, but it wasn’t. In my mum’s case, it wasn’t. It was her soul who wasn’t ready, who couldn’t believe this was happening.

It took her ages to leave. By that time, she was no longer in her body and I could sense her welcoming party gathering, but she stayed in the room with us. I’d started telling her long before they turned everything off that it was OK, that she was allowed to go, that she could let go now, that we would meet again if that was for the highest good of all, but she kept staring at her body with this intense sense of disbelief.

They gave her five minutes after flipping that last switch, and she took ten before finally walking away, her front still facing us. After her soul had left, it took her body, her heart, another ten minutes to give in.

This past year, I’ve had to come to terms with a lot. Something my auntie – that auntie I can tell things to, the one who’s ex-husband (my mum’s brother) was part of my mum’s welcoming party – reminded me of two days ago, when she was over for a cup of tea.

Like Flannery O’Connor, ‘I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say’, and as I’m reading this here, I’m thinking that maybe the biggest thing I’ve had to come to terms with – am still coming to terms with – is that she wasn’t ready. That her soul wasn’t ready. That there was no peace.

She’s at peace now, I know that much. My mum’s soul is incredibly joyous and youthful and curious and whatever she needed to do this life, she’ll simply do another. I went into our collective Akashic Records a while after she passed, and she was beaming, very ready to do this again with me some time. But she wasn’t in that moment, and that shook me more than anything.

When I reread what I’ve been writing here, that seems the part I’m still hung up on. And I can’t figure out why. Was it because my mum wasn’t ready? Because experiencing her passing from that soul-level perspective shattered some guarantee I thought was in place, that we only left this plane when we were ready to?

It’s probably both. It usually is. Both have pulled the rug right out from under me, made me question so many, many things, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that one was compounded by the other.

Which isn’t to say I won’t ever come to terms with it. As a great pivoter, I excel at coming to terms with things. It just means it’s going to take some extra time for this new reality – a reality in which I became an orphan before turning forty and lost a belief I, in hindsight, used as a pacifier, as a way to maybe spiritually bypass a discomfort I should have been sitting with – to sink in.

It might be why it still feels like my mum’s just gone for the weekend and will text me any minute now she’s on her way back home. Or maybe that’s just what losing a mother feels like.

On days like these, I truly feel like I know nothing.

xx Mariëlle