Mom HAD Cancer
How do you even start to write about something like this?
… Like this
On July 9th and 12:08AM, my mom passed away.
The days leading up to this moment were filled with a ton of emotions. I was sad, anxious, hopeful, hopeless, thankful, worried and about a thousand other things. The last time that I saw my mom upright was on the Wednesday before, she was talking, sitting up, and she even ate a few M$M’s. My sister found out a day or two later that she was no longer to take care of herself. A hospital bed was brought to her apartment and she was given 24-hour hospice nurse care. The next time that I saw her she was basically unconscious.
She was heavily medicated, her eyes were half open and her mouth was wide open. With oxygen helping her breathe, we came together as a family and simply sat with her and spent time together as a family.
Almost all of her hair was gone and she was skinnier than any kid or person that I saw while on the race. It was very difficult to tell whether she was awake or not, the only way you really knew was if she moaned in pain or not. It was really hard to be in the room with her. Now she had lost so much weight that she literally had no more butt, so what that caused was her tailbone to rub against her skin and create soars. The nurse also said that because of the constant rubbing of her tailbone, that it wore away the skin and you could see part of her tailbone.
She was in so much pain.
Around 11:40PM on the 8th, the nurse told us that it was pretty close to “time”. We all went in the room with mom, sat around her and simply was with her. She breathed deeply from her diaphragm, and as 12:08 came around, she took her last breath. It was so peaceful, and it was as if her last breath wasn’t her last, but her next breath.
We all kept crying, and my grandma (her mom) lost it. We started praying and thanking the Lord.
Now I am not telling you all of these details to fish for sympathy or to make anyone feel bad for me. I’m telling you all this so you can see why the 1st word out of my mind when she passed away was “finally”.
Finally my mom was no longer heavily medicated, finally, she was moaning out in pain with any energy that she had left, finally the cancer that had moved from her bladder, to her liver, to her brain and to her bones, no longer was causing her all of this anguish.
It was as if her last breath was the switch to allow me to finally breathe for the 1st time in a long time. Yes I cried and I am sad the she is gone. I will miss her for the rest of my life, but I am so relieved that she isn’t in that pain anymore.
I told myself that I wasn’t going to hold anything back and if I needed to cry or whatever I was going to embrace it, but I haven’t needed to since the day that she passed.
Hopefully all of this makes sense. Thank you everyone for all of your prayers, support and love. It goes farther than you know. If you have been praying for peace for me, The Lord has been pouring it on me and filling me up like I was a cup under a waterfall.
If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask.
If you have a mom to text or call or see, don’t hesitate, tell right now that you love her and that you are thankful for her.
Cancer is a name, but there is a name above all names, and that name is Jesus.
That is still true
