My mother died today. Me, my brother, his daughter, and three of my mom's closest friends were there. The nurses transitioned her to what they call comfort care, took off her oxygen mask, and she was gone within 30 minutes.
It’s hard to think of what to say and how to describe her. She was complicated, and our relationship was complicated – I am, objectively and unequivocally, my mother’s daughter, after all. She was the largest personality in my life for 43 years. I suppose it makes sense that I struggle to do that justice.
We could talk about her working three jobs when my brother and I were younger and my father was unemployed and/or in jail. We can talk about her being a single mother putting herself through nursing school. We can talk about her career as a nurse, working overnight shifts in a terminal oncology ward for years, the number of funerals she was invited to, the number of heartfelt notes and cards she received from family members who she helped. All of that is true.
We can also talk about how when she was admitted to the hospital, my brother took her hand, looked into her eyes, and told her he loved her. Meanwhile, the admitting nurse asked her some standard question about her safety. Our mother, sick and weak from COVID, immediately responded with “Yes, I am scared for my safety. This is my son, and he’s a very violent man.” Both nurses stared my brother down, and he just sort of blinked back at them until she laughed.
She once took a fake snake and hid it in my bed, so that it greeted me when I pulled the covers back. I retaliated by hiding it in her toilet – I still say I won that prank war, but she insisted it wasn’t fair to use the toilet. She also used the unfairness reasoning when my brother turned the tables on her by screaming “train!” right as they went over the tracks. She nearly drove the car off the road. After she got it righted, hoo boy was Todd in trouble. You do that to me all the time, he said. But it’s not fair or funny to do that to the driver, she responded. He still laughed.
At the hospital this morning, one of her friends commented, “We finally found a game you can’t cheat, Jill.” We laughed, because it was true. You’d think laughing at someone’s deathbed isn’t the way it’s done, but that was my mom. Her sense of humor could be dark, and it could be inappropriate - irreverent, I think is the word - and if you’ve ever wondered where I get it, or my brother gets it, well, now you know. I cannot tell you the number of jokes we’ve made this week. The only person who could appreciate them as much as we did would have been our mom.
But really, if you asked my mom how she’d want to be remembered, I think she’d want to make sure we mentioned animals. She was a steward for all creatures. If there was a dog, cat, or horse that everyone else had given up on, my mom was there. She could drive down a highway at 65 mph and say, “I think there’s a cat in that ditch.” And there would be. That’s a true story, by the way. I can’t remember that cat’s name now, but she lived another 15 years after my mom saved her.
She is also the reason I had Pete dog – she saw him online, drove from Texas to Missouri only to realize he wasn’t quite the dog she wanted. That’s ok, said the shelter staff. He’s so sick, we need to put him down anyway. Well, that wasn’t going to happen, so she called me on the drive back asking me to watch this deathly ill Missourian dog until he was healthy and she could find him a home. And of course Pete lived with me for 12 years.
Did she have a baby goat that learned to come in the dog door and would show up in the kitchen at dinner time? She did. Did she have rabbits that had free range of the house? She did. Did her soul horse Norman sometimes get invited into the house? He did. Did she have, throughout the years, a whole pack of territorial little dogs who loved and protected her from every ankle that came near her? She sure did. Did she have a cat so feral that it made everyone in the family bleed copiously at one time or another? She did (his name was Ivan the Terrible).
I don’t think I can write enough to capture who she was. I’ll probably think of so many better examples but sometimes you just have to pick what you have and go with it. All I can think of right now is how one of her friends hugged me this morning and told me that my mother was the sister she’d never had and always wanted.
She was stubborn, she was complicated, she was caring, kind and funny as hell. One of the last things she texted me was “This sucks, but I’ll live.” I wish she’d been right. More than anything, I wish she’d been right.
Jill (McFadden) Tallant and Debby (Tatlock) Smiley
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