Still Shining Brightly

I meant to write yesterday, but the workday was especially hectic and had I decided to write, given my level of frustration and fatigue, the quality of my writing would have been greatly compromised.  I’m in much better spirits today.  I’m not quite at 100%, but I’m a little better now than how I was yesterday. 

The picture above would be at that of the early morning moon yesterday, which I took at 4:26am, when I left the house.  I’d be at work about 13 minutes later. 

At 4:26am on 10/18/18, I was driving home into a similar moon.  My drive was naturally illuminated by that full moon, which I took as a sign that in some cosmic way, Mom was shining down on me in the near two hours since she died that morning.  She died at 2:34am that same morning. 

I made the drive home in especially good spirits that early morning, considering what I had witnessed shortly after 2:30am.  My siblings and I would witness our mother take her last breath, as her stop finally stopped beating.  If I had to do the math on this, her heart took about nine hours to reach that final beat.  At about 5:30pm on 10/17/24, Mom was disconnected from whatever medications had been coursing through her body that day and likely before then.  This was our sign that doctors knew that the end was near and that keeping her on the medications would have just prolonged the inevitable.  The initial estimate was that Mom would have been gone within the next two hours. 

But no, not Mom.  Just as she lived, even in death, she wanted to be stubborn.  She wanted to go out on her terms and rest assured, she took her sweet time doing it.  As I said earlier, she took nine hours to depart. 

I remember arriving at the hospital that afternoon just after 3pm.  Mom was unconscious at the time and as luck and maybe fate would have it, she would never wake up in the near 12 hours that I was there.  Still, I like to think that she could hear us and that she knew who was in that Intensive Care Unit room with her. 

Before she took her turn for the worst the day before, there were plans to put her on dialysis.  I assume that there were thoughts that her kidneys had been damaged and that she might have needed the assistance in getting her blood cleaned.  Either way, it didn’t matter because her blood was really infected to where the majority, if not all, of her organs were failing in unison.

In the end, it was sepsis that took her life.

She would be cremated and she remains on the mantle at Dad’s house.

I don’t want to get too emotional, but I will admit that not a day goes by where I don’t miss her.  As much as I can’t just pick up that phone and give her a call anymore, I want to think that she is looking down on me and my siblings, looking on at what we’re doing and seeing how life is treating us.  I also believe that she would be very proud at what all of us have become (if she wasn’t already when she was still alive) and knowing that she and Dad gave us a foundation to make something of ourselves and that we all built on our respective foundations.

Well, today (10/19), in this weirdly optimistic way perhaps, begins the march towards Mom’s seventh anniversary of her death.

Keep looking down on us, Mom.  Hopefully, the four of us are still making you proud.