Two Hospital Visits, 48 Years Apart

48 years ago today, my mother made a visit to a hospital and I was born. She was 32 years old, and I was the 5th out of what would become 6. She was married to a kind man, and had a world full of family, friends and church.

Today, she's back in the hospital, wrinkled, shrunken, and dying. Her husband is a memory almost two decades old, and most of the friends she had are gone. Her children are mostly scattered.

On Monday, she checked into the hospital with severe dehydration brought on by nausea following radiation treatments to relieve pain from bone cancer which had metastasized from breast cancer diagnosed in mid-February. Her kidneys have now shut down, she has developed fluid around her heart and lungs, her adrenal gland is suspect and she has pneumonia. On Thursday, she told me she thought she would be ready to go home and live alone again in a few days. Earlier today, her heart became so irregular that they called my sister to be with her at 3 in the morning, because it appeared she may be dying.

She was born in 1928, a second generation Polack on the north side of St. Louis. She married young, partially to leave a difficult home environment, and she married a handsome veteran of WWII with a sharp intellect, quick wit and gentle kindness. She was social, beautiful and perhaps a little headstrong. Their marriage, at least as it appeared to a child growing up in the small, packed house, was quietly happy - I don't think I ever heard angry words between the two of them.

Her husband, my father, had a massive stroke in 1982 that left him paralyzed and robbed him of his speech, and she was left to care for him until he died in 1990. After that, she kind of blossomed - she took over his seat on the Board of Aldermen in Beverly Hills, Missouri, and became the City Clerk. A yellow dog Democrat, she got involved in the background of County and municipal politics in St. Louis, and traveled with her sister to Ireland, Canada and Hawaii.

A few years ago, the politics turned nasty, and she left our home and bought a small townhouse in O'Fallon, a contemporary suburb of look-alike homes and chain restaurants in strip malls.

She grew up in a world of radio and her father worked on the railroad. She spoke of walking down to the corner bar and bringing her father locally-brewed beer in a pail. She loved to rollerskate and bowl. She hosted card parties and tupperware parties and "kidnap" breakfasts, where the ladies of the parish would show fill their cars with unsuspecting neighbors and "force" them to come over and have breakfast.

She is wired differently than I am or anyone else I know - with an absolute sense of wrong and hardheaded willingness to bear a grudge for years. One daughter-in-law she loves now spent a decade in the doghouse for daring to move to the town her son was living in. She did not attend the wedding of one of her daughters, or even let me know that it had happened, because the groom was a divorced man. Another sister removed herself from the family as a result of clashes with my mother. To this day, she is unable or unwilling to fully accept a granddaughter who went through a difficult period years ago. I do not understand her emotions or the depth of her antipathies, but I've learned to step aside from the full force of her anger. Her personality hearkens back to the an age of blood feuds and intergenerational battles. We, her children, joke that we will find a marked up list among her belongings after she is gone that will reflect her final ranking of her children.

Sometime soon, perhaps today, perhaps 2 weeks from now, almost certainly within a couple months, she will cease her struggles and her only presence on earth will be in the memory of those of us who knew her. When I started this blog almost 5 years ago, I wrote my first post about her and ended it with

Sometimes I feel like such a bad son. I never visit, and my irregular calls are usually multi-tasked with TV or some amusement. We have not really ever been close. But, Friday night, I thought she was beginning the death process. Now I know I have a limited time with her - maybe enough time to change our relationship.

That relationship has changed for the better, and I'm glad of it, though I failed in many respects. I wish my children had known their grandmother better. I wish I had visited more often. I wish I had learned more about her early life, and shared my life with her more freely.

This is not a happy birthday. The woman who created my life is losing her own. She's alert and lucid, and beginning to realize that she's not going to survive. She's not caught up in fear, but she's not unafraid, either. Similarly, I want her to live, but I'm tired of watching her suffer with tubes and monitors all around her.

I'm 48 years old today, and I know I need to say "goodbye" to my mom. And "thank you" - for everything.

Literally everything.