Just a few lines to say that I was off this week because my mother died. She was 90. She lived a very long and very full life. For her, medically speaking, it was not supposed to have been painful or long. It was a matter of simply taking a last breath. She had lost the ability to swallow properly and was aspirating food regularly. She went to the hospital on Tuesday night with a particularly vicious aspiration, and nearly died. They managed to stabilize her by midnight, and when we left her on early Wednesday morning, she was sitting up and alert.
Miss Molly, Edith, Amy, Kelly, Lindsay and Tom all pulled together so that I didn't have to come to school on Wednesday, and then again on Thursday and Friday. When I arrived at the hospital on Wednesday morning about 9:00, I expected my mother to be rallying and improving. She was not. She had slipped into a semi responsive state and remained in that state Wednesday and all day Thursday. I was so very grateful to our teachers for allowing me to spend those 36 hours with my mother. I was able to sit by her bed all that time and try to comfort her. She was able to receive the last rights of her faith, and then on Thursday evening about 11:00, she passed peacefully away with Miss Molly, Miss Katy, and Terry and I all standing there saying an Our Father. She looked surprised as if to say, "Oh! It's all true...!"
My mother's death was not a sad occasion. There had been much missed in life between us, and that's a sad thing, but her death revealed so much. My concern for her was a matter of getting the spiritual care she needed, and that was easily and beautifully achieved.
My brother drove up for the memorial service at Holy Rosary, and we later got together for a party at my house. It was asked at that time by someone not familiar with American custom, why we would celebrate such an occasion. He was a little surprised.
The celebration was in her life well lived, that death, as a natural experience, was not a rough or painfully ordeal, that she would not return to a difficult life on a feeding tube, and finally, that her death united so many people, and the love pouring forth from this event, her death, could not have been greater. Everyone has to die. When death is as positive an event as my mother's death was, there is reason to rejoice.
My mother would have loved the party in her honor. Every member of our staff was present either at the Mass or at the party. My only sibling was there and all my loving family.
I wanted all my grandchildren who were there to understand that death, although sad and sometimes untimely, can be a joyous occasion because like birth, it's a part of our life.
My mother was an amazing woman. She was born with polio, had diphtheria as a child and still managed to live a very very full life. Women like her will not be seen again.
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