A Tribute to My Mother
When I considered whether or not I would add this personal post to my website blog, I thought, maybe this isn’t an appropriate platform to be sharing such a personal experience. I also wondered if this would fit with the health and wellness themes of most of my posts. After thoughtful consideration, I realized this post is very much about Wellness. It’s about knowing and living right action and honouring Truth.
‘I kissed my mom goodbye for the last time yesterday morning. As much as I already miss her terribly, I also take comfort in knowing she is finally free of a body that hasn’t served her for the past 42 years.
If you have not yet heard of MAID (medical assistance in dying), I trust/hope that you will hear and learn more about this in the months and years to come now that it is legal and available in Canada (for those who meet the criteria). This is how my mom chose to die.
Knowing the exact day and time someone you love is going to die is a very strange thing. To have that date looming in the shadows for almost a month, in the midst of holding a wider landscape for the Great Unknown.
Making that ‘appointment’ was one of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever had. When I think back now, that was the moment it became real. Until then it just lingered in the realm of possibility. That morning it was anchored in reality.
In the days just before her death she asked me if I felt that what she was doing was selfish. My answer was, absolutely not. You are the most courageous and brave woman I’ve ever known.
We really don’t know what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. We can’t know. We can make all kinds of guesses about what we might do if handed the same set of life circumstances yet we can’t truly Know. Each human experience is unique. Each path their own. And this was hers. I am grateful she was given the right to choose. And I feel so proud and blessed to have had her as my mother.
In the weeks following, I was able to recognize what a gift this was. This opened a huge portal for truthful conversations in our family. As difficult as this was, it was also both necessary and healing. And there was simply no room for anything else. To be given the opportunity to say everything I needed to say. To tell her all of the ways she enriched my life. I knew she had always felt like she wasn’t a good mother. Never being able to do all of the typical motherly things we take for granted. But she was a wonderful mother. She gave me the two most important things. Unconditional love and support. I was able to tell her this and so much more. I was able to ask for forgiveness for not giving her the space to express how hard things were for her all those years. For giving over Truth in exchange for my need for her to be ok.
What a gift to have the time to say goodbye, thank you, I love you and I’m sorry in the most meaningful way. To give her a massage every day in that final week and memorize her body, smell, and skin. To hug her a million and one more times. To have her die at home surrounded and held by her family. To hold her in Sacred Space, Grace and Love and have her be awake and coherent right up until the moment she fell into a sleep from which we knew she would never wake.
This was both the hardest and the most beautiful day of my life.
Her life didn’t go as she dreamed it would but she was most certainly surrounded by an abundance of love. And she knew it.
Multiple Sclerosis took many things from her but it never touched her beauty or capacity for love.
As my Dad said to my Mom, ‘this may not have been the life we planned but it was still a beautiful life.’ This was was the final chapter in their incredible love story.
Mom – you weren’t able to fully realize that what you did is helping to change our culture around death and the right to choose. This is no small thing. A deep bow to you Mama for helping to pave the way for others to have choice and dignity in how they die.
Thank you for teaching me empathy, kindness, courage, compassion, resilience, and what unconditional love is. Thank you for teaching me to appreciate the simple things in life. Thank you for giving me my life so I could give Jack his. I am who I am today in large part because of the morals and values you instilled in me. I thank you for this and a million other little things. I will love you forever.
My grandma said to my mom (her first born daughter) the day before her death, ‘tomorrow you’ll be gone but you’ll be everywhere’
Yes she is.
My late grandfather, Jack Nightingale, wrote this poem for my mom more than 20 years ago. It’s a fitting tribute today.
If it were true that when we die
God lights a candle in the sky
The star he’d have to light for you
Would be a brilliant dazzling hue
They’re not reserved for king and Pope
They’re reserved for those with courage and undying hope.
I share this experience in the hopes that it may help someone else going through this new and mysterious death process with a loved one. (I wished I’d had more resources. Maybe I can be one for someone in the future)’
