In Her Time of Dying

Originally published on mommyboots.com, December 2011

Feb 07, 2025

One of the most powerful urges I’ve experienced during this whirlwind that began when I received a frantic phone call last Wednesday evening was the urge to write.

I wrote a short post on Christmas when we first admitted mom to Hospice and didn’t write again until today. I toyed with the idea of not posting that first entry, but I decided to share it because it is how I felt when I first got here.

I want to chronicle the evolution of my feelings … My blog has never really experienced nor contained anything this heavy. Not even my miscarriage was this heavy.

So if thoughts of death and dying bother you, feel free to skip this.

But perhaps you know someone who is also going through this. Perhaps that person is you. And maybe reading this will make you or someone else not feel quite so alone in what you’re experiencing.

I’ve decided to call this chronicle In Her Time of Dying.

December 25th, 2011

I step out of the elevator, turn the corner and reach the doors that to the hospice unit. I pause as I read the sign stating how family and friends are welcome, but to be quiet and respectful within.

Dying people need quiet and respect.

I push the heavy double doors open and step inside, gazing down the long hallway. I eye the doors that hold people whose time is running out inside and take my first step towards her room, my footfalls echoing on the hardwood floor.

I hate it here.

It’s secluded. Peaceful. Clean. The nurses are sweet. But still I hate it here. I am afraid. I am uncomfortable. This is a place of finality; a place of whispered apologies, forgiveness. A place of tears and memories shared.

The critical care unit, where mom began this journey, didn’t have the same feeling. In that waiting room, people were waiting to see what was going to happen. Waiting for their loved ones to get better. Here, we are all only waiting for one thing:

Death.

The air is heavy with the promise of it. Here, it is guaranteed. In the rest of the hospital people mend broken legs and have surgeries—but here in the hospice unit, there is only one thing that happens. The faces of the families who wander the hallways are all the same: tired, grief-stricken, confused, numb.

I reach her room and enter and I am gripped with a sudden urge to turn and flee. This is the closest I have ever been to death and a dying person and I want to run away and pretend this is not happening.

I do not run.

Instead, I venture into the room and stand beside the bed where my mother lies dying.

I look down at her, discomfort and anxiety flooding my body. We haven’t had the best relationship; my mother and I, and I would actually venture to say that it has been a bad relationship.

I harbor a lot of bad, resentful, angry feelings toward her that I’m struggling to let go because they don’t matter anymore.

I hate it here.

Dec 27^th, 2011

I’ve come to feel slightly more comfortable with the concept of this place. We’ve met a lot of really nice people; very supportive people and staff. The nurses, the counselors, the chaplins are all amazing folks.

We are at a Catholic hospital, which worried me at first considering we aren’t even remotely Christian/Catholic. But nobody—with the exception of one nurse who thought it would be a good idea to get into my mother’s face last night when she thought that the end had come and asked her if she had accepted Jesus Christ into her heart as her personal Lord and Savior—has been pushy or evangelical at all.

My brother, my mom’s partner, and I have been talking about what to do after mom dies—and it’s weird.

Talking about cremation, burial, and eulogies while the person you’re talking about is still alive in the other room is surreal and strange.

Mom’s breathing has changed. I watched her chest today. It was like it was caving in every time she inhaled. She’s working hard to breathe.

The phrase, “My mother is a fish” comes to mind.

Part of that is because we’ve turned her oxygen off completely. She’s been pulling her mask off herself almost since she first got to the hospital; it’s the one thing she’s been able to control and has been very clear about—she does NOT want that mask on her face. Since she can no longer communicate, we made the decision for her to leave it off.

Her skin is a dusky gray combined with a jaundiced yellowish-orange. She twitches and flails occasionally, which the hospice nurses said was normal and a part of the body’s preparation for death.

Anytime I hear a noise or a beep, I think it’s the end.

Just when I feel like I’ve come to terms with the actual process of her dying, there’s a false alarm and I feel panicky. I’m not sure where the root of the feeling is; when thinking of everything else I feel very ambivalent and numb but when I think that the actual moment of her death is nigh, my pulse quickens and I feel nauseated.

I am scared. I think it is because I don’t know how I’m going to feel when it does happen. I am very skilled at masking my emotions that when this woman who has caused me so much misery, pain, and anxiety is no longer alive to poison me with her toxicity, I’m not sure what my emotions will be or how powerfully they will come. I am afraid to feel them.

I took a long walk around the hospital today, wandering nowhere in particular to clear my head and stretch my bones.

I strolled slowly, without a real destination, and observed the different vibes of the wings I walked through. I prowled the hallways of the critical care unit and remembered the fear and uncertainty I felt our entire stay there.

I visited the surgery waiting room, where there was a similar air of anxiety and questions waiting to be answered hanging in the air.

I wish this hospital were a place where babies were born. I would have liked to have passed through the waiting rooms filled with proud grandparents and relatives waiting to greet a brand new life. It would have been a breath of fresh air before I returned to the place where people are waiting to meet death.

My feet carried me to a coffee shop, and back again down the hallway leading to the hospice unit. As I rounded the corner and saw the double doors I noticed that the air changes once you reach this part of the hospital. It hums around you with a quiet respect and dignity; it’s not necessarily heavier, but it is more solemn. It’s a feeling of finality; the closing of a chapter on the lives of every person who has someone in this unit.

I wondered as I wandered if “hospice” was written all over my face. I wondered if the lost, numb, haunted, resigned, confused glaze over my eyes was recognizable to the hospital staff.

We met with a grief counselor today and I liked her. I wonder if this experience might be the push I need to finally be ready to seek my own personal therapy to fight my inner demons and try and shake off some of the ghosts of my past that still haunt me.

My mother has always held such a power of me in the sense that I made a silent, somewhat subconscious vow to myself that she would never see me overly emotional. No tears. No joy. No love. No fear.

She had betrayed and violated my sense of trust so completely and so many times over the years that she no longer held the right to see me at my most vulnerable. I suppose in a way I was always afraid that if she did catch me with my guard down, she would seize the opportunity and sink her claws into me, injecting her poison deep into my veins.

My hope is that her passing will weaken those walls enough that with some therapy, I can finally send them tumbling and be free of the poisonous power she held over me.

I have a long road ahead. First, I have to get through today. Then tomorrow. And so on.

December 28th, 2011—Morning

I am back at work today.

“Back” at work is really a relative term. I am here, and I am also not here. When my alarm clock went off this morning, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I wanted to ask my husband to take our daughter to daycare and go on to work so I could lay there.

Instead, I pushed myself out of the warm comfort of my covers and into the shower. I went through the motions of my normal morning routine and found myself getting back into the groove of it once I started drying my hair.

It seems like a million years ago that I last did this routine before I was thrown into a blender and poured back out again. Getting my daughter ready, packing her bag for daycare, fixing my coffee and driving the normal route to get Josh to work felt alien; like it was something normal people did in a different dimension.

Normal people whose lives hadn’t been flipped upside down in just seven short days.

Normal people who hadn’t spent the last week in and out of the hospital surrounded by chaos and imminent death. Doing these mundane things felt both strange and comforting.

As I’ve been shuffling about in this whole ordeal, I’ve felt like a ghost of a person drifting amongst the living. When people ask the courtesy question: “Hi, how are you?” I pause for a second before answering. I want to tell them what I’ve been through in the past week, but it’s not quite socially acceptable when the clerk at a gas station asks to unload the burden of your dysfunctional relationship with your mother who is dying in the hospice unit you admitted her to on Christmas day, is it?

So I pause and answer honestly: “I’m doing okay”.

I’m feeling those emotional walls I’ve been building and fortifying for the past fifteen years beginning to weaken a little. The kindness, love, and support that I’ve been surrounded by has chipped away little blocks here and there. I’ve found myself accepting and returning gratitude more easily than I have before.

I’ve always had a hard time conveying and expressing my thankfulness and appreciation. I have a hard time telling people I love them. In the past few days the words have fallen easily from my mouth. I sometimes think it’s because I simply don’t have any energy to put forth into keeping my fortress up.

This experience is changing me. I can feel the change and yet I cannot put my finger on what exactly is shifting and evolving inside of me.

I simply know that it is happening, and I accept and welcome it.

Afternoon

My bosses bought us lunch yesterday and had a coworker deliver it to the hospital. Their support and love has been overwhelming.

We ate in mom’s room with our food on our laps and didn’t talk much. I sat there eating my fajitas and kept thinking that it seemed wrong somehow that we were eating such delicious food in front of a dying woman.

I keep thinking things like, “she’ll never eat Mexican food again” or, “she’ll never use a toilet again.” Knowing that death is coming makes you think of those things, I guess.

I’d look over and see the output from her catheter—there wasn’t much there but it was a reddish/coppery color that made my stomach turn. I kept looking at that thing, the last of the urine my mother would produce, and I wanted to be sick.

I wished that we’d gone out of the room to eat. The sound of her breathing (shallow but gasping, rattle-y and sick) and that container of piss made me lose my appetite and want to vomit.

I ate every bit of my food, though, because I apparently am a bit of an emotional eater. I never really realized this until this week’s events began to unfold.

I talked to my brother, who stayed with her overnight. Her vitals are declining. The nurses offered a vague guess of maybe a day; maybe a little more. Her time is winding down. I just want this waiting to be over.

I don’t want to do this anymore, and I don’t think she does, either.

I’m going to the hospital soon to meet my brother for lunch. The thought of being in that room with her and her shallow, gasping breathing makes me anxious and scared.

Early Evening

I went to the hospital for a few minutes to pick Drew up. They were in the middle of giving mom a sponge bath. I went in because she was agitated and making a lot of noise. It was really upsetting to see her like that, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the way the nurses handled her. They were not hospice nurses, but normal hospital nurses. They didn’t have the deliberate, gentle, slow touches that we’ve come to trust from the hospice nurses. The whole experience freaked me out really badly.

Mom is running a fever. One of the hospice nurses that I trust most came in to talk to us about needing to bring it down. She suggested a suppository, and from the experience mom went through earlier in the day I was really hesitant. Fortunately the hospice nurse offered to do it herself, and she was so gentle with her, mom didn’t even stir.

The nurses and staff here are truly unique and special. I feel blessed to have met the people we’ve met.

Note: My mother ended up dying this evening—December 28th, 2011.

Natalie’s Substack

Discussion about this post