rehearsing my mother’s death
I have been rehearsing my mothers death since I was a child. As a diabetic, if her blood sugar got low and no one caught it in time to inject insulin she could go into a hypoglycemic coma and get brain damage. That is what happened on Tuesday, December 1st. At 64 this is a tragedy. It is also a miracle that it didn’t happen sooner.
As a juvenile diabetic from the age of 14, her diabetes was historically difficult to manage. As a person who suffered from depression and, in my childhood years, undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder, she mismanaged her diabetes as a form of self harm. As an alcoholic, she was in her room alone at night drinking and watching TV while my father was at work and my brother and I shared the living room and avoided argument as best we could. As the older child, that left me in charge.
Over and over again I would find my mother in a state we called ‘low blood sugar.’ To me it looked like being very drunk. Her words were slurred, her movements slowed, her face muscles relaxed. Sometimes she was awake, sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she could talk, sometimes she couldn’t. Disinguishing the low blood sugar from actual drunkenness became an art.
First I would try to give her a glass of orange juice. If I caught it early enough this would do the trick. Unfortunately getting her to drink the orange juice was about as easy as getting a drunk person to drink water. I had to be careful that she was in a condition to swallow, otherwise she would choke. Usually early in the process I would call my father at work & alert him so he could be prepared to leave work and come home to give her an insulin shot. Sometimes he would go back, other times he would stay home and we’d get an extra night with him.
If I found her slurring or in a light stupor I would try to give her orange juice. Sometimes I would find her already in a coma. I would try to shake her awake. When I couldn’t, I would get the neighbor and she would call 911. As I got older I called on my own. It was usually firemen who arrived first. Many of them. They would flood into her bedroom, packing it like a sardine can as one of them gave her the shot.
I got a call that she had been found in a diabetic coma that set in sometime in the previous 36 hours. I assumed it would be like all the other times and she would skirt fate yet again and wake up lucky. That was not the case. Her brain had been too long without oxygen and suffered severe and irreparable damage.
Walking into the hospital room I became a little girl again. After the time it took to acclimate to the sad reality, the time it took to push through the awkwardness of talking to an unconscious person, the initial uncomfortable ramble. As I settled in, my child self came out. I held her swollen hand and cried, “mommy, wake up."
There is a peace now that the story is written. Mommy wake up from so many things. Wake up from your mental illness, the unpredictability, the impossible to anticipate and always poignantly painful sideways comments kept me at arm’s length. Wake up from our ego struggle, the dynamic we seemed to be locked in, you feeling so loving and proud of me, yet me feeling like I could never do anything right or at least right enough to be insulated from criticism.
The more deeply I healed the wounds from my childhood, the more my relationship with my mother eased. In mid November I was given the affirmation “I reclaim my blessings with mom” and I truly started to. “Help me remember my mothers love” and I could feel it through the fog of trauma, the numbness from hurt. “Legions upon legions of angels surround my mother and help her feel my love and forgiveness” and as I pray they do, I feel them all around us. They always were there, just waiting to be called on.