The day my mom died was not the worst day of my life. It was surprisingly freeing. In a win-win sort of way, her last breath ended her suffering, and ended my suffering. The worst day, as it was for me, was being told by a short haired lady in a long white coat that my mom would never wake up again. I went completely numb. I looked at her writhing around in pain, unable to open her eyes, unable to look at me ever again, and that’s when it hit me. That finality, that sinking reassurance the woman in front of me wouldn’t say “I love you,” ever again. That, was the worst day of my life.
I went through the process of blacked out rage, punched a wall, experienced crippling shock and a nauseating headache. The doctor said it was only a matter of hours before she died, and suggested the best course of action was to unplug everything except the oxygen and move my mom to a quiet corner room, make her feel at home, and wait it out. We met with a grief counselor, a social worker, were already pawned off to a laundry list of trauma therapists and told PTSD was common in these situations. I couldn’t think straight. Wasn’t PTSD for war veterans? Is this a life war?

I didn’t expect my mom’s life to play out in the end like it did. She, a maintenance drinker my whole life –her whole life– began a vicious downward spiral in the summer of 2010. There were a plethera of reasons to cause depression for her, but it was so unknown to me what drove her to hide vodka bottles, glasses filled with vodka, diet coke bottles mixed with vodka, vodka waters in the morning, vodka on the beach – just vodka everywhere.
Luckily for me, and the mahic wheel of genetics, I never adopted the addictive personality of my mom. Growing up, her with a glass of wine every night was normal. If she didn’t have a glass of wine, something was wrong; that’s just how it was. There was no such thing as “addiction” or “habitual drinking” at that time. It was a known fact that a wine glass was merely an extension of her left hand, and a cigarette of her right. I’ve only dreamt her absent of both.
As I grew up, and became more aware that no, it was not normal for an adult to drink at the same time everyday, multiple glasses, and fall asleep on the couch, I began the pleading process with my mom and tried to convince her she could do without.
“You’re not the parent.”
I loathe– utterly, and truly, loathe that phrase. In four words, my power of influence over that woman was stripped of me, over and over again, each time I brought up the subject of her addictive behaviors. I couldn’t cope with her self-abuse, sunk into a solitary depression, and in the process found my own addiction – food. So as I coped, and traveled, and lived away at school,  progressively growing in size and shrinking in self-respect, my mother sat at home, selling houses, became a recluse, and began the slow process of killing herself.

We were over-educated on the process of necrosis, how the liver is killed and begins to break apart inside the body. We saw the catheter bags, filled with coffee-black urine from kidneys that ceased to work. I looked over  her deep yellow hue, bloated belly, and straw hair matted down. This isn’t her. My heart shattered at the thought of never having her again. Her quick wit, her sarcastic and brutally honest demeanor were lost to me. I lost my best friend so many times in her, and this was the last time.
The important step was to administer a numbing agent that would alleviate pain and also assist in the process of dying (quite frankly, after watching the suffering my mom endured at the end of her life, I now support case-by-case adult euthenasia). This shell of a woman lay in a hospital gown, hissing oxygen the only audible tone aside from the throb of my headache, and the quiet ghost-like murmurs of visiting friends and family. I didn’t blame my own friends who stayed as long as they could, but couldn’t handle the sight of a woman dying, while her family watched in a quasi-sickening anticipation. We all by this time settled with the notion that she would never wake again, and we said our goodbyes, countless goodbyes, and we waited.
I wrote her eulogy on the first night, next to her bed, while my family sat around.
Any minute now. I could see it written on their faces. I fell in and out of sleep, and distinctly remember being woken up by the voice of my grandmother, my mom’s mom, who passed almost four years earlier.

“Patty is in here.”

Now the dead are speaking, awesome. I jumped up and ran to her room. It was about five A.M. and she was still breathing. My dad was awake.
“She was never a quitter.” Ironic, I thought, her not being a quitter is what got us all here in the first place. I looked at her in the bed. Now you’re just being an asshole.
The next afternoon dragged. I washed myself in baby wipes and ate Lorna Doone cookies with tiny gingerale’s to satiate myself. I had no appetite, but my giant Italian family was there and insisted I throw something down my gullet so I didn’t get admitted myself. I watched and watched, her vitals unchanging, “Lord of the Rings” on the television in the background. People came and went, I stayed next to her. Tears came and went. Tears came and went again. Tears made multiple unwanted visits. How do I have tears left? Must be the gingerale.
The third day was sunny and bright. Mom lasted much longer than this twelve hour bullshit the doctor said. She was clinically brain dead, but her heart wouldn’t quit. I stood at the foot of her bed, alongside a family friend, Sue, who lived behind my grandpa’s house. I saw the shock in her face, not realizing the damage my mom cause to herself. I saw the same gutted loss of someone who wasn’t completely dead yet.
My mom started to move.
She’s fucking moving.
I caught, in the corner of my eye, her body rolling to the right. She’s trying to escape! The tone of the room changed immediately while for a shared moment we were all flooded in shock, disbelief, and a silent rage that mom was moving. Sue jumped up, looked down only to realize she was sitting on the bed controls and my mom in fact, was still in a coma, but was now on an unstoppable roll over the side of her bed, ass out, body limp.
“Oh my god! Oh my god!”
My dad and brother grabbed her shoulders.
“Hold her down! Stop the bed!”
Sue found the switch and stopped my mom from toppling over onto the floor and returned her to her original state of sleep.
We all looked at each other, in shock, and began to laugh. In a split second I went from being solemn, to in absolute disbelief my mom was coming back from the dead, to a slow, boiling rage that she put me through hell only to come back swinging. You bastard, I thought. I thought how mad she would be to learn I wrote her eulogy before she even stopped breathing, and how happy I was to think I’d hug my mom again, and she’d hug me back.

My mom died quietly on a Monday. The sun was out, and it was warm and breezy for the end of September. Her birthday was in a week.
“Maybe when you come home for my birthday, we’ll do something fun and spend more time together.” She said that to me in August the day I moved back to Massachusetts for my senior year of college. And here we were, September 26 – I hadn’t left her side in days. It was just her and me present when she stopped breathing. My brother and his girlfriend we asleep on the floor and in an armchair, respectively. I answered my phone to hear one of my closest childhood friends on the other end ask how I was, and how my mom was. I rolled over to look at her, and with two last breaths, she ceased to be.

“I have to call you back. I think my mom just died.”