“The doctor wants to meet with us tomorrow to talk about a care plan for mom,” my brother explained. “Can you be there?”
“Of course,” I said, because family is everything.
Mom had been sick for eight months or twenty years, depending on when you started counting. And both numbers would have been correct.
I expected the doctor to offer options for a new treatment regimen. But we’d moved beyond treatment.
From her hospital bed, mom listened to the grim prognosis. She hadn’t lost her sense of humor or her positive attitude, which made the beeping and flashing of medical equipment and the doctor’s message even more surreal.
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The doctor finished explaining why treatment options were no longer viable, looked mom in the eye and offered a summary that was painfully blunt: “You don’t have a year. You don’t have six months. We’ll do what we can to keep you comfortable, but you should make peace with whatever higher power you believe in."
I wanted to scream and cry and throw up. I was too numb to do any of them.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to talk,” the doctor said, and he left the room. The door eased shut with a pneumatic hiss.
Mom looked at my brother and then at me. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes were sparkling with something other than tears. Her voice sounded as it had over thousands of family dinners, a curious combination of compassion and impishness: “That’s a hell of a note.”
It sounded so much like my mom that I had to laugh. Granted, it was kind of a strangled snort of a laugh, but it was still a laugh. And it was a good reason to start breathing again.
I’ve thought about that moment often, and I’ve come to realize that mom knew what the doctor was going to say even before he said it. She’d made peace with her fate, and wanted us to make peace with it, too.
She was giving us permission to let her go.
She’d lived her life knowing that this part of her existence was finite, but the reward for a life well lived lie somewhere beyond.
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Two days after meeting with the doctor she was so heavily under the influence of pain medication that the “mom” I knew was gone. Two days later, she died.
But the night before she passed from this life to the next, she reached a hand toward something only she could see and inched out of her delirium long enough to utter the last intelligible word I would ever hear her say.
“Light.”
I was at her bedside when she died, but I never said good-bye.
I said “See you later, mom.”
Billy Graham said “My home is in heaven. I’m just traveling through this world.”
And as she always was when I was a kid, mom is at home.
Waiting.
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Dan Conradt, a lifelong Mower County resident, lives in Austin with his wife, Carla Johnson.
