By Madlynn Haber
When my mother died, I was left in her room in the nursing home, alone with her newly dead body, for quite a while. A night nurse pronounced her dead at 5:30 a.m. I had been sitting with her for a couple of hours as she gradually, peacefully, and undramatically let go of her life. I called the nurse in after her rattling breathing, which was getting slower and slower, seemed to stop. The nurse felt her pulse, took a stethoscope to her chest, and told me she was gone. “Are you sure?” I asked. She was.
It seemed oddly sudden and shocking. Her death was anticipated for several years now and more than expected for the past few months. I had been told at two thirty in the morning to come now if I wanted to say goodbye. There was no reason to be shocked and yet that was how it felt.
They had to call a doctor in to confirm and then wait for the funeral home to come and take her body away. So, there I was left alone in the room with my now dead mother. I continued to sit by her side, holding her hand, waiting for it to get light. I wasn’t at all sure what to do now. Tears had been flowing freely for the last twenty-four hours. Now that her life was stopped, so were my tears.
I waited before calling anyone. It seemed too early and what could they do anyway? As it got light, I stepped into the hallway. The shift was changing and arriving and departing staff offered hugs and words of condolence. The tears returned. Someone took her roommate out of her bed and kept her out of the room. I thought it would be disrespectful to start packing my mother’s things before she was taken away. I went back and forth between the hallway and her bedside for a while. I finally called my aunt, my sister, and my daughter. I asked my daughter to join me and bring some bags and boxes so we could clean out Mom’s room.
I thought about taking a photo. My phone was filled with photos of Mom on every holiday, at every celebration since she came to live close to me in the declining decade of her life. There were photos in her room, in my house, at outdoors events with walker and wheelchair, and with every relative who came for a visit. With so much of her last nine years documented, I wondered if I should somehow record this final visit, our last hours together, her finale.
Buying gifts for my mother over the years she was in a nursing home was always expected and increasingly challenging. For some occasion a few years back, I found a unique pillow in a specialty store. It was cylindrical, black, and covered in a soft, furry material making it a nice lower back rest. On one side, there was a piece of white material in the shape of an arrow with the words My Way Or No Way written across the arrow in red letters. You could press a button and small lights flickered over the letters. My mother found it funny as did the staff that worked with her, especially when she pulled it out in response to some dispute or direction she didn’t want to follow.
As I waited in the morning light for the people from the funeral home to come and take her away, I placed that pillow at the end of her bed leaning up against her feet. She was covered in a white sheet. I took a photo of the pillow resting below her draped body, making sure to cut the photo before her head appeared in the picture. I took two shots of My Way Or No Way. She would have laughed at the juxtaposition of her now dead body and her beloved pillow. I’ve never shown that photo to anyone. It was the last joke my mother and I would share.