My mom had a stroke a decade ago and another one last year. She had been suffering from heart failure for several years. She had been hospitalized twice in the past year. My sister-in-law Lucy called yesterday to let me know that my mom wasn't feeling well. Or, worse than usual, anyway. I had already known because I had talked to my mom the day before, and she had literally asked, when complaining about her ongoing health problems, why the doctors wouldn't just let her curl up and die.
And at 2:00 in the morning East Coast time, my dad called to tell me that mom had passed. He was beside himself, which is not surprising. He is a drama queen to begin with, and if it were me at home with her, I would have been forced to google what you do when someone dies relatively peacefully at home. 911 doesn't seem like the right answer. There is no longer any risk to life and no emergency service that can help the situation.
It's a very practical problem that is the sort of thing my mother would have taken a deep breath and handled.
But she's gone.
And as self-serving as it often seems in other people, the thoughts of "what she would have wanted" keep rising in my mind:
She would have approved of my dad's joke that, ever the designated driver, she died on 4/20. She would have approved of my joke that it was the stupid iron supplements that she had started taking that were what killed her. She would have found it funny that my last text to her was that I hope she feels better soon. She approved of making light of, well, everything.
Should we cancel the trip with Antonio to Berklee College of Music this Saturday for New Student Welcome Day? Fuck no! She would not have wanted us to stop living and doing joyous things.
Should they hold a memorial for her? (As Jose keeps pointing out, they donated her remains to a medical school—shut up, it's what she WANTED—so there can't be a proper "funeral.") I feared that the people most materially affected by her death—my dad and my brother's family for whom she was essentially a domestic worker—would decide to have one. She would not have wanted a funeral, and even if they held one, it really would have only been her family getting together to mourn together because she had all but withdrawn from contact with anyone else.
What she would have wanted was for us to not make a fuss over her death and to go on, as productively and happily as possible.
I hope that my brother and dad are eternally grateful to Lucy for dealing with body. Ever practical, my mother had tried to arrange it before her death, but there was an issue with the organization that she had contracted, and Lucy stepped in and arranged for UCSF Medical School to take the body instead. If it had been left up to my dad, he probably would have let the mortuary talk him into buying a $10,000 casket in which to cremate mom's body, which would have absolutely infuriated her ghost, if such a thing existed. I feel like it should be someone's campaign to let poor people know that they can do a double good of donating remains for organ donation/tissue harvesting or medical school training and save the ridiculous expense of a funeral and burial. Some organizations will even return the cremated remains—if you're interested in that sort of thing—after the useful bits have been taken to pass forward life and health. (I also started googling after Lucy told me about the hiccup with the first organization, but I didn't think both of us working the problem made sense, especially since it's more in her skillset. If not for her, I'm sure I, from the opposite side of a continent, would have been the one trying to arrange the donation so I am also thankful for Lucy.)
I have lots more thoughts that I will need to write about because, despite the irrational pull to do so, I can't call her to talk about how to go about grieving her immeasurable loss...
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