Sisters of Mercy

A few weeks ago my husband, daughter and I spent a weekend sitting with my husband’s dying mother Jacki; she passed away just a few days after we returned home.

In a tiny Ohio apartment in the coldest days of January, her husband and many family members surrounded her hospital bed, offering what each of them could in love and comfort, seeking ways to say good-bye. The five stages of dying and loss played and replayed themselves not necessarily in neat order, with everything from anger to denial (“I am not dying!”) to acceptance and surrender. I struggled to find ways to respect her experience and her needs as she drifted further and further away hoping my own family would do the same for me one day.

The experience evoked memories in me of other losses including my last days with my father, sitting by his hospital bed feeling as helpless as hell, wishing with all my heart that I could somehow halt the relentless failure of each organ in turn, the inevitability of a life slipping away.

“There’s nothing you can do for me, kid,” he said at one point as we shared an orange together. I remembered him years before offering my grandfather sections of orange in the convalescent home during the last few months of grandfather’s life.

“I know there's nothing I can do—but I wish there were.  I wish there were,” I replied.

And what do you do for the dying in those last hours or days when they can move so swiftly among flashes of fear, denial, regret, pain, acceptance, love, anger? Surrounding her bed, each of us did what we could. Her daughter and her friend stayed there and provided care day and night, her sons were there for her in every way they could be, each of the grandchildren did their best, her husband sat by her bed and asked if there was anything she needed.

I rubbed Jacki’s feet and legs a couple of times, for as long as she seemed to want me to, and was rewarded with the smallest of smiles as she gazed into my eyes. I told her we all loved her. I asked her questions about her distant past, trying to focus on the good memories. I helped her with a few sips of water, took my turn giving her meds mixed with yoghurt, distracted her from her discomfort while the hospice nurse bathed her by talking steadily of those sun-filled summer days at a Florida beach years ago when she took the grandkids for a few nights and gave my husband and me some delightful alone time that meant the world to us at the time. I thanked her once again for that kindness.

My sister-in-law and I sang Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” together for her as I played the guitar.

Oh the Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me their song.
I hope you run into them, you who’ve been traveling so long...

We all sang another song she remembered and liked that the family used to sing together: “Abilene.”

Everybody did everything they could to provide love and comfort at every opportunity and yet in the end of course nothing could halt the process, and a few days after we left, she was gone. I am, as I always am after a death in the family, with the feeling that somehow I could have done more, or done things differently--the familiar regret that always consumes me when a family member is gone forever and I’ll never hear that voice again.

Farewell, Jacki.