And Here We Are

 I’m here sitting beside a hospital bed for the umpteenth time since March and I am sad. My mother, who I have had some strange ups and downs with over the years but who I love with all my heart, is lying in that bed waiting to have fluid drained from her abdomen for the fourth time since October. 

She kicked the stomach cancer and almost immediately got laid flat by a tumor in her lower abdomen. She’s had three rounds of some powerful chemotherapy treatments and is wasting away before my very eyes. She is down to a skeletal 94lbs and is unsteady on her feet enough that she requires assistance whenever she gets up. When I look at her, I scarcely recognize her. She lies in her bed most of the time and stares at her deceased mother’s photo, wishing to be with her. She has random days of feeling well enough to sit in her recliner but those days are few and far between. 

The chemo wipes her out for at least three days after and just as she’s getting over that, the fluid builds in her abdomen and presses on her lungs making it hard to breathe or eat. 

And here we are, both tired. Both heartsick. 

I want to believe that she will beat this and be my lively irritating chatterbox Mama again but my heart knows what my mind tries daily to deny. 

Unless God works a miracle over her, this will be my last Christmas with her. It hurts my very soul to think that, much less type that. 

My dad is in complete denial and acts half the time as tho he thinks it’s all in her head. He thinks she won’t eat because she doesn’t want to, not because she can’t. She’s just paranoid, she doesn’t really need the fluid drained. She’s doing this to herself. If she would just eat, she’d get better. And I admit to having those thoughts, myself. Because it’s easier, less painful to believe she can eat enough to cure this. But I know. And deep down, he does, too. 

All of this is made even harder by the fact that my sisters are largely excluded from all of this because of Covid. They haven't seen the slow fade or had to hear their mother say she just doesn’t want to be here anymore. They’ve seen her at a distance a handful of times and I know it’s so hard for them to not have this precious time with her. 

And it is precious time. I know I am blessed to be allowed this time with her. As hard, and frustrating, exhausting, and as heartbreaking as it is, it is also precious. 

I just keep praying it lasts and the end is far away. I pray that I am wrong and next Christmas finds us celebrating her recovery.