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Warning – I’m going off the rails of my usual blog fluff here. It’s been that kind of day.

Not sure why I feel I need to post this, perhaps the anniversary of my mother’s death is bothering me more than I realized, but here goes.

I read a series of novels written by Rob Hart recently…

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It was a good romp, but in almost every book there was a section dealing with this topic:

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They say you write what you know, and this author nailed it.

If you’ve never seen a dead body…. and I mean right after death, not processed by a funeral home…. I’m glad. I wish I hadn’t, because what he says is true.

My mother passed in a hospice. She was only there for five days and it was blessedly quick as deaths by cancer go. I was at her side every day, all day and into the night. It was horribly sad and utterly exhausting. I did it alone for the first four days but on the fifth, my husband insisted on coming. To be honest I didn’t want him there. He doesn’t wait well or patiently, and when you’re sitting bedside vigil that’s really all there is to do. My mother was heavily medicated and thankfully free of pain, but she was also mostly unconscious. He tried, but only made it until 5:00pm and then convinced me to leave for the night. She died an hour later. I’ll never forgive myself for not being there, but that’s not the point of this depressing post.

The point is that the author was correct. When I returned to say goodbye and gather my mother’s things a mere hour after she passed, the difference was startling. I don’t know what I was expecting, hers was the only recently deceased body I’d ever seen… but it was indeed just that. A body. Sunken in on itself and completely empty. Everything that was mother had vanished. In a perverse way, it made the final goodbye easier. She was well and truly gone, spiritually and physically.

It’s definitely not like the movies, neither serene nor beautiful.

Just empty.

💔

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