Lavender

by Meg Regan

I hadn't spent any time in the dining room for months. Despite that it contained the only table and chair in the entire house, I couldn't bear to sit there very long. In fact, without thinking about it, I'd cleaned the rest of the entire house, yet virtually ignored this room.

The shade of lavender on the walls had lost it's appeal, and the table where my mom and I once sat rehashing our days and our lives, over glasses of wine or mugs of coffee, was now covered in layers of dust, as were her many knick-knacks.

The portrait I painted of her, done in the evenings over several months spent talking, crying and laughing, still hung on the wall. There's not much of a likeness, but I treasured the nights spent doing it, and the stories mom told me while I painted.

There was the one about the cave gang, a group of burly guys who would come to their childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania and lift their sinking house out of the ground. They lived in a coal mining town and the foundations of the houses would actually disappear into the ground. Once every six months or so, the "cave gang" would hit their neighborhood and lift them back up.

Or the stories of her father, once a cook on a ship. He made his own beer in the basement and my mom would go to the store and buy supplies for him. The parish priests were always dropping in to their kitchen to have a glass of Mac's brew. The nuns came by as well, but they never did partake. Oh no, Mr. McCormack, they'd tell him. We just couldn't.

And a tale that never ceased to amaze me was the story of how she was walking home from church one day with friends, when she got this feeling that something was terribly wrong. She turned around and ran back toward the church as quickly as she could, and two blocks away, came across her mother, who had fallen and was unable to get back up. She didn't know how she knew something was wrong. She just felt it, and didn't think twice about acting on her intuition.

She had lots of stories. Some were her favorites so I'd heard them before. But I wanted to hear them again, to listen closer, to remember them forever.

Looking back, perhaps I knew she was dying. We'd always been close, but suddenly I felt the need to be closer. Then again, perhaps it was my dad's death the year before that made so painfully aware of how fragile and fleeting life can be.

There was so much I wanted to tell her, so much I wanted her to tell me. But even though I lived right on the other side of a double house, there were always things to be done, so most of our conversations were held over chores. I'd make my way over to mom's dining room table with onions to chop, eggs to peel, cards to write, bills to pay and usually, my daughter Maureen in tow.

She'd make coffee, and we'd talk.

I still recall the rainy Saturday afternoon I painted these dining room walls lavender. Mom hadn't been feeling well, and doctors couldn't pinpoint what was wrong with her. She wasn't leaving the house much those days, not even to work in her garden, which used to be one of her favorite pastimes. I thought a change of color might do her good.

At first, she was resistant, insisting that her walls didn't need painting, and that I had enough to do without painting her walls. But eventually she gave in, even got excited about the idea.

"What color?" I asked.

"Surprise me," she said.

I picked lavender. Later, I would recall her telling me that lavender reminder her of death. She never did say why, and the thought never crossed my mind when I looked at the paint charts. And, of course, as it went on the wall, she said that she just loved it.

While I painted that day, she made coffee, sandwiches and chips. She cleaned the pictures that would go back on the walls and Maureen helped her polish all the knick-knacks and miniature houses she'd acquired over the years.

All the while, we talked. We talked about Maureen’s school, work, family, the way Sam, the cat, had taken to following Mom out to the clothesline each day, the news. Our lives were far from exciting, but we never seemed to run out of things to talk about.

When I was through painting and we'd reorganized the room, Maureen had a bubble bath, while Mom and I drank port wine out of mismatched coffee mugs and admired the new look. We felt pretty pleased with what we had accomplished.

Things were simpler then, and happier.

As I sit at this table remembering that day, I can scarcely believe that my mom's been dead for more than two years (God rest her soul, as she would say). When I think about it, it still devastates me to know that someone who is such a huge part of my life could vanish from it so quickly.

Her angelic face, her soothing voice, her warm hugs and a lifetime spent raising six kids have been reduced to a box of ashes that sits on my bedroom dresser beside my father's ashes, a photograph of her holding my oldest brother Timothy, a sock she wore on the day she died, and her old powder puff, the scent of which still reminds me of a warm hug.

On a shelf in my kitchen sits a familiar box containing her false teeth. My mother chose to be cremated, but her dentures were left behind on the bedside table, and I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. Yet it still feels odd having them here. It's as though she's left them behind, and it's so unlike her.

Mom never went anywhere without her teeth.

Then again, she never went anywhere without saying good-bye either. I understand now that she couldn't, that it was too painful. I was closer to mom than anyone, and in the end she physically pushed me away. I tried really hard not to cry in her presence, but it didn't matter. As always, she sensed my sadness, and it was more than she could bear.

But even while her body was ravaged by this devastating illness, she continued to look out for us, even sparing my sister and me the pain of having to tell her that she was dying.

Her second to the last doctor appointment was really hard. It had become difficult to get my now fragile mom out to the car, despite the fact that I'd rented a wheelchair.

She was tired of living this so-called life, with oxygen, I.V.'s and medications that must be administered every other hour. Somehow, Maddie, mom and I made it to the pulmonologist's office. It was in November, on the windiest grayest day I've ever experienced in South Florida, and I desperately needed her lung specialist to help us through this.

Somehow, we made it there. When the doctor placed the stethoscope on her back and listened, he had a look on his face that I will never, as long as I live, forget. A short time later, he asked my mom if she had her papers in order, just in case the doctors were unable to do anything for her.

I excused myself and went into the restroom, where I sobbed uncontrollably for 10 minutes before pulling myself together enough to emerge.

Afterwards, I spoke to the doctor alone. He could only offer advice on helping her get through this as comfortably as possible. I realized that he didn't think she would pull through, but I still clung to the hope that her rheumatologist would feel differently, that she would tell us that this man was crazy, that, of course, my mom wasn't going to die.

The next day, we went to see her. Again, it was all my sister and I could do to get mom there. It was on a Saturday evening, and the wait seemed to be taking forever. Finally, we were called in, and the doctor thoroughly examined my mother, but didn't appear hopeful. When I wheeled mom back into the waiting room, Maddie went back in to talk to the doctor. She asked her to be straight with us about how much time mom had left.

Two weeks. She actually said two weeks. Prior to that, I thought six months was the limit on this type of bad news. Two weeks was unimaginable.

The doctor left it up to us to tell her. We couldn't, but she knew, in the same way she always knew things we didn't tell her. Oddly enough, when we arrived back at home and got mom settled into the hospital bed my brother had set up in her living room weeks earlier, she said 'Ya know, I can't lay around here staring at this ceiling forever. Call the boys and ask them to come. I want everybody home and in their beds where they belong."

It mattered little that they were spread halfway across the U.S. and we didn't have enough beds to put them in. Mom never let those sort of minor details get in the way of real life.

Tell them, she said, that we're having a party.

It wasn't exactly what we told them, but after breaking the gravest news imaginable, we told them what mom said about wanting us all home and in our beds where we belonged. It's what she used to say when we were little, and somehow, through the tears, they laughed, and found comfort in her words.

After the calls were made, Mom asked Maddie to go the store and shop for some groceries and then proceeded to tell me what I should cook. She knows I keep busy when I'm trying hard not to think about something, so she gave me plenty to do.

But not tonight, she said. Tomorrow.

That night, she let me sleep in her bed. A little slumber party, she called it. I lay there beside her long after she fell asleep, and let the tears roll quietly until there were none left.

My energy depleted, I let myself fall asleep peacefully for the first time in ages. Miraculously, mom didn't cough once that night. And for those few hours before she drifted off to sleep, she seemed like her old self, and I allowed myself to feel, at least for a few treasured hours, like everything might be OK.

I wrapped that feeling around me like a thick soft blanket on a cold winter night. But when I awoke, I was forced to emerge from that cocoon, and I found myself feeling totally unprepared for the transformations that would take place over the next several days.

After dad died, mom had told me that she, too, would want hospice if she was suffering. By the time we'd been able to get my dad into a hospice, however, he'd suffered too long, and had been poked and prodded and jabbed by people whose only goal was to keep him alive, no matter how much he suffered in the process.

Once in the hospice, they took away all of his pain with morphine, and helped him to die with dignity. I knew that mom would need help, too. But I didn't want to shock her by just having hospice show up.

I knew I had to broach the subject with her during a lucid moment, and I spent hours trying to work myself up to it. I wanted to be strong. Yet when I finally knelt by her bed to talk with her about it, I fumbled for the right words, asking if she'd remembered the things we'd talked about, asking whether she would like to be made more comfortable, asking whether it was time for me to get her some help. ...

But my heart was breaking. And eventually, I lay my head down on her bed and awaited an answer. Mom's vision was failing her, and for that moment, I felt thankful that she couldn't see my tears. I wasn't sure she understood what I said. But then she hugged me and told me that, yes, she would like help.

But not now, she said. It's not time yet.

Worried that she would be unable to communicate her needs to me when the time came, I asked how I would know when it was time.

"When the time comes," she assured me, "you will know."

Within 24 hours, I knew. There was no morphine this time around, and mom's death was, in some ways, harder then my father's. Unlike my dad, who fought to live, my mom fought the battle to die.

As my brothers began to arrive home, she spent time talking to each of them individually, or sometimes in pairs. Often, she was too tired to talk, but she seemed to want to give them a chance to make their peace, to say the sort of things she never got to say to her own mother, who died unexpectedly in the middle of the night. But mom's lucid moments were becoming few and far between. Eventually, she stopped eating and refused all liquids. She wouldn't take the medications. Each time one of the home nurses tried, she closed her mouth.

Next, she started ripping off the oxygen mask.

Each time one of us would try to gently put it back on, she would take it right back off. A social worker from Hospice explained that mom was tired now, that she was ready to move on, and that we needed to give her our permission to go, to let her know that it was OK for her to leave us behind.

I thought my brother Bob would do this for me. He'd always been the reliable, level-headed one, and I depended on him to know just what to say at a time like this. But suddenly, he seemed even less capable than I, and I was a mess.

Somehow, we got through it. I talked and he sat quietly nearby. Afterwards, we sat in the yard for a few minutes, crying together in quiet disbelief. By this time, we were all absolute basket cases. Luckily, we didn't all lose it at the same time. When one of us did, there were always others who felt strong enough to hold things together.

But we had been living dangerously close to the emotional edge for days. The morning hospice arrived on the scene, for instance, they had a delivery person bring in all new medical equipment, and swap it out for the old. There was an oxygen concentrator, a wheelchair, a commode, and various other things. And every hour or so, it seems, people were running in and out of the house, some picking things up and others dropping them off.

In the midst of it all, my mother lay dying.

My brother James became so enraged about the commotion the delivery people were causing in a room where our mom desperately needed peace that he called hospice and threatened to take all of their medical equipment out into the street and smash it into fucking smithereens if one more person came knocking on our door.

On another evening, we called a hospice nurse out in the middle of the night because my mom was uncomfortable and extremely restless, and there was nothing we could do to make her feel better.

We didn't want her to feel any more pain, but the nurse wasn't as we'd hoped she would be in getting my mother the medication she needed. So my sister physically blocked the front door and told her that she wasn't leaving until my mom was provided something stronger for her pain.

I guess she sensed the desperation in my sister's voice, because she did as she was told. She got on the phone in the wee hours of the morning and told her supervisors of her predicament. By the time she left, a morphine patch had been ordered.

It wasn't delivered until the next morning, however, an hour after my mom had died.

Later, I wondered what that nurse must have told her family about her visit to our home, where at 4 a.m. every one of us was so close to breaking.

The week felt like one long day that went on for years. Six emotional siblings in one house, each bringing their own feelings to these final days, and all of us struggling to make mom more comfortable, yet feeling helpless because there was nothing we could do to keep death at bay.

It was more than some of us could bear. Two of my brothers didn't make it. One was halfway back to Minnesota by the time mom took her last breath, and the other was at Fort Lauderdale International Airport, running as far away as he could from the devastating truth.

I am sure they regret having not been there as much as I sometimes regret having watched her take her last breath. There is nothing as quiet as the silence that descends in the moments after a person has died. Suddenly, everything seems so still, as if the world has stopped, and it becomes difficult to imagine that outside of these walls, people are working, laughing, eating, driving.

Despite that I had cried a river that week, I was oddly collected in the moments after mom's death. I made calls, rounded up bottles of pills for a chaplain who said he had to remove all medications. And when he asked whether I needed to talk, I assured him I did not.

What, after all, was there to say?

On the phone, he informed someone that Mary McCormack had expired at 11:20, and I thought it was such an odd use of the word "expired," as if she were a magazine subscription that had just run out.

He told us that Mom, who now looked more peaceful than she had in many weeks, would soon have to be taken. I did not want to be there when she left her little house for the last time, so I joined others who headed to the airport to track down James before he got on a plane.

When we came home, Mom was gone, and I knew I would never see her face again, never hear her laughter, never feel the warmth of her hugs. I also knew I couldn't stay in the house that night, so I called my favorite local Irish pub, and made reservations for a large party for dinner. Then I told everyone that we were going. I never asked if they wanted to, and they seemed grateful that someone, anyone, had made a decision for them.

I wanted to eat and drink and talk and hear music and do things that normal people who hadn't just lost their mom did. I didn't discuss her death that night. I couldn't.

When we came home, the bed, which had become the focus of my mother's living room and my life for these past few months, seemed emptier than ever. Mom's glasses were still on the bedside table, as were her false teeth and a glass of water. No one wanted to move them.

Instead, we piled onto the bed, and the couch and the floors and drank wine and talked until the wee hours of the morning about mom and all she had been through, and about us and all that we had been through, and all that we were still going through. We laughed until we cried, and cried until we laughed. We tried to remember, and then we tried to forget.

But we couldn't.

Eventually, sleep came, and we welcomed it.

The next morning, I woke up and I thought to myself, my God, my mom is dead. It would be a very long time before I would wake up and have that not be the first thought that popped into my head.

The rest of my family, one by one, drifted back to their homes, their other lives, each taking with them some small piece of mom's world - rosary beads, a special knick-knack they'd bought for her in grade school, a photograph that held special meaning for them.

We talk about her often, and struggle not to think about those final days. We know how much she loved us, and how difficult it must have been for her to leave us. I'm still haunted by the fact that she never cried, and I still feel guilty in thinking that she was trying to be strong for me, and worse yet, that I still needed her to be.

She wasn't just my mom. She was one of my best friends. I could tell her anything and know that she would not judge me, but that she would love me and try to understand me, no matter what.

And sitting here in this dusty lavender room two years after her death, I still felt the loss, and realized how much I had covered up, how little I have moved on. I became acutely aware of the raw emotions which still lay so painfully close to the surface.

I had to dredge the emotional well, bring it up, feel the pain and let it go, so that I can feel the warmth of her love and all that it had taught me, rather than the coldness of her death and the paralyzing fear of my own.

Remembering all the times Mom and I had spent together painting rooms, both hers and mine, I went to the paint store, chose a bright shade of yellow, the color of sunlight, and began to paint over the lavender. I moved the table to a new spot, rearranged the pictures, I cleaned her house collection and polished knick-knacks.

Then I poured some wine into her favorite coffee cup, sat back and admired the new look. The lavender is gone now, and I'm glad, because the color reminds me of death and I need to start thinking about life, and love, and things that really matter at the end of a day.

I had become so paralyzed by grief and fear that I became afraid to make a decision based on my heart. And now, I know that I must trust in my heart again, to follow it's beat, even at the risk of pursuing it down a painful path.

I think, even in her death, that mom continues to teach me about the meaning of life, and what is truly important, and it's not what we spend the bulk of our time doing.

When I leave this world, the floors I scrubbed will get dirty again, the stories I spent years of my life writing for someone else, will be long forgotten. And the stuff I've acquired over the years will just have to be sifted through, sorted, boxed up and shipped out.

But perhaps, if I'm lucky, someone will have loved me enough to want to keep some of my favorite things, perhaps a shirt I wore a lot, a half used bottle of perfume, a couple of my stories, or a book I once treasured.

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