A Good Deathing

I have spoken a lot about silence in my last blogs. But now I know a new silence..the silence that comes after a good deathing. This was a new term for me when Carrie, the hospice nurse spoke to us in the final hours of my mother-in-law's life. "It's so much like birthing," she said. "And now she is in transition..where she is totally within her body, doesn't want to be touched and is using all her energy in breath." But instead of creating life, she was creating a good deathing.

We began the vigil on Monday night, March 21--the day she was moved from the hospital to the hospice house after the heart attack. It was also beautifully the day that marked the equinox--the turning to spring. That night we had her birthday party with ice cream and flowers and singing as her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered around. The next day was her real birthday and she kept reminding us of that fact. She always loved her birthday. 86 years of life from a girl of prairie in Kansas, to a teacher with credentials from Oberlin, to a 'mail order' bride of sorts who went to live with her college roommate's brother in the wilds of Alaska in 1949.

She wasn't perfect in her life, but she was real. And she made decisions based on relationship. She was the kind of grandma who played with the kids down on the floor and when I came to pick them up after work, they took one look at me and said "Go home, Mom." She was silly at times, leaping and twisting in ballet moves in the kitchen while she cooked. She was sentimental, keeping corsages even back from high school in her scrapbooks. She was faithful, never forgetting a birthday or saying a prayer for family or friends in need. And she was strong in her own way, defying the odds by beating addiction in her later years when they said it couldn't be done. She did it for love.
She was a lover of life; on my first canoe trip with she and her husband, Bill, they came to camp after a hot day of paddling, ran to the edge of the lake, stripped off their clothes to their skivvies and jumped in the lily pads.
She died an hour after we left her on Saturday night. The night nurse found her after midnight on March 27, the anniversary of the Alaska Earthquake of '64--an unforgettable day. But on this night, the Alaska pioneer who spent her life camping and hiking and exploring breathed her last.

The two days prior had been hours of labored breathing. As we sat by her bedside it came down to just this...listening to her breath. Becoming slowly aware of its effort and spacing and hesitations. Wanting to help her make her chest go up and down and yet wanting her labor to end. So when her daughter, Cindi and her granddaughter, Laura and I got the call in the middle of the night that she had passed, we were struck by how quiet it was when we entered the room at 3;00 a.m.; a silence of relief and grief, of solemnity and celebration, of completion and yet beginning. It was a silence that welcomed us and assured us, as we blessed and dressed her body, feeling like Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome going to the tomb on Easter morning...only the body was still there.

A day or two before she died, my husband Steve asked how she was doing. She roused herself from that place where she stared beyond us and said, "I think I'm going to be changing cabins soon." A good woman. A good deathing.