May 10, 2017

Random Acts… When your mother is gone

Posted in Health, Women at 6:36 pm by dinaheng

My mother passed a few weeks ago.

She fought stomach cancer for more than two years, going through radiation treatments and chemotherapy to eek out one more day with her children and grandchildren.

My sisters and I did our best to take care of her, so that she would be able to die at home when the time came. For the last six months, I have been flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Houston to help out, spending more and more time with her until the end. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.

You never really know what it means to lose a parent until it happens to you. If we’re lucky enough to have parents who are still living, we usually take their presence for granted. Mothers and fathers, after all, are supposed to be the ones whose lives revolve around us.

But when we realize that time with the ones we love is truly limited, everything changes. Suddenly, losing income is not as important as losing precious moments with Mom. Losing the “normalcy” of everyday routines doesn’t matter when you’re needed to take her to the emergency room, again and again.

Losing sleep doesn’t matter when your body instinctively wakes up at 4 a.m. to check and see if Mom needs help to go to the bathroom. Losing your appetite means little when you watch your mother become unable to eat anything that’s not thinly pureed or liquid.

Together, we went through the ups and downs of remission and the return of cancer. I held her hand as she made moaning sounds, unable to talk about her fears, and watched her struggle to get into the wheelchair when she was too weak to walk anymore. Through it all, she never gave up hope of living… one more day.

The week she died, I left Houston on Wednesday, telling her I would be back in two days. She passed the next day. I guess she couldn’t wait for me to return.

The days have been a blur since then. I cry whenever anything reminds me of her. I am grateful that just as she brought my sisters and me into this world, we were able to help her pass into the next.

This Mother’s Day, a friend — who also recently lost her mom — and I will be having lunch together to celebrate our mothers. I’m sure we’ll both have plenty of memories to laugh and cry about.

That’s what happens when you live life to the fullest.