My Mom Died

 April was rough. May was really rough. June is just kind of MEH.

My mom passed away on May 16. That was incredibly unexpected. My emotions have been all over the place since then. The sale of her house has stalled since I can't do anything until I've been appointed Personal Representative. That really sucks. Because now I really just want her house off my plate and gone - I truly don't want to be there anymore. It's no longer hers, I just hope that another family finds it and they fall in love with it and make it a home. 

But I have to say, congestive heart failure is no joke. I'm absolutely positive that 65 years of smoking just wrecked her body. Her symptoms started last summer, which I think she hid and didn't want to tell me. At one point she had an endoscopy - the pictures showed so much cigarette tar on her insides. It was not good. And the water retention was insane - over a week the doctors pulled over 30 POUNDS of fluid from her body. When your heart isn't working properly, it takes a huge toll on your body. 

Her new heart valve failed right in front of me. She went from talking normally to basically dead within an hour, and this happened at her scheduled doctor's appointment. Thank goodness we were at the hospital when this all happened. This is not the first time I've sat with someone dying in front of me so I knew what to expect. It's not like the person just falls asleep in front of you. When someone says "they died peacefully" I'm like no, they fucking gasped for air and were delirious for quite awhile before it actually happened. So it's traumatic for all. 

And now that I'm not over at her apartment almost daily or talking to her on the phone, it's like I have this weird sense of guilt - like I should be taking care of her but I'm not. I've literally been going over to her house or doing something for her every week since we moved back her 17 years ago. That's a long fucking time of caretaking. She wouldn't ask my other siblings to help - just my brother for lawncare and basic house stuff until he moved out of state - so it was me that did literally EVERYTHING. I did grocery shopping, housework, donations, weeding, grabbed her mail every other day so she wouldn't have to walk to her mailbox, made her appointments for her, drove her everywhere. I didn't realize how much time that took up until a few weeks ago when I cleaned my house without being interrupted. 

So I have a lot of emotions running through me. I'm supposed to meet my family on Saturday and I'm not ready to release my mom yet. I will gift my siblings their portions of her ashes but I'm keeping mine. I probably won't be ready for a long time. Maybe next year or the year after.