Goodbye, stranger

Katherine died Sept. 6, 2016 at the age of 75. My Mom was a secretary, a homemaker, a volunteer, a ball-buster. She taught me how to ride a bike, how to cook and how to use the laundry machine when she got tired of dealing with my smelly socks. She took me to all those practices and games for my baseball and basketball teams. And she waited up all those nights when I was out on the town and up to no good.

Above all, she loved her husband, her two children, her daughter-in-law and her two grandchildren. Here she is on my wedding day. She looks very happy, and who could blame her?

But that woman I knew was not the woman who died alone in a nursing home bed last week. That was somebody else, beaten down by three-plus years of sorrow after my Dad's death. When Dad passed on in March 2013, Mom's depression set in. We tried so hard to get her out of the house, to get her to remember what was still good in her life. But she wasn't having any of it.

After a pair of brief stints in short-term care facilities, the dementia started. Mom couldn't be alone at the house where I was raised -- where I'm sitting right now and typing this up -- and she had to be moved into an assisted living complex. Communication came in fits and starts. One-word sentences, punctuated by stuttering and occasional anger toward whoever was in the room at the time. I called her on the phone one time and she said she didn't want to talk to me, and hung up. I don't know if that was the sickness taking its toll on her, and it doesn't really matter. I just know that it hurt. A lot.

This went on for a couple of years. Then she fell and broke her hip this past spring, had emergency surgery and was placed in a different facility where she refused to do her rehab and refused to take her meds. That's where she died last week, unrecognizable to those who cared and loved for her after all these years.

That's not how I want to remember her, but goddammit, I'm mad right now. I want to know why she gave up. Why she decided that life wasn't worth living. Why she didn't get help when it was there for her.

I keep telling myself that this should be a relief. She's where she wants to be, right by Dad's side in Village Cemetery in Old Wethersfield. Truthfully, I haven't been the same since Dad died, either. I learned he had cancer about a month after my 40th birthday. I was there in the room at the hospital with my parents when the doctor said that Dad had between nine months to a year left to live.

There's been a cloud up here in my little hometown for these past four years. It's affected me in ways I cannot describe and I pray to God it hasn't harmed my marriage or the way my children look at their Dad.

I'm going back to Virginia tomorrow and I'm going to try and make sense of all this. I've spent the last week making funeral arrangements, rifling through paperwork, meeting with attorneys and handing out copies of death certificates. I'm fucking tired right now, pure and simple.

I'll never be able to repay you for all you did for me, Mom. I'll always love you. But it didn't have to end like that. So I'm going to stay mad for a while and try to remember what was good. Rest in peace.

Love,

Joey