It was a quiet fall day in October. I believe it was Wednesday; it is crazy to think I can remember exactly what day of the week it was when sometimes I can’t remember what I had for lunch that day. My mother was diagnosed with cancer four months prior. After a couple of months of chemo and radiation treatments, she was quickly losing her battle. To think this all began with a routine physical with a new physician, resulting in the discovery of a football-sized tumor growing in her stomach. Bravely, she asked the doctor, “How long do I have left?” As the doctor cleared his throat to answer the dreaded question, he gasped, “6 months at best.”
The next few months were a struggle to watch my beloved, caring mother deteriorate in front of our very eyes. Each day seemed to get worse and worse. The chemo was kicking her ass physically to a point where she would get fatigued for doing the simplest task. Getting out of bed or off the couch became a chore, and she began sleeping eighteen-plus hours a day. In a morbid way, it gave us time to get used to the idea of not having my mother around much longer. It was also ironic for my mother, someone who would consider marijuana equivalent to a drug like heroin because, quote, “drugs are drugs,” to find weed gummies from her children as a form of relaxation in her final months.
It was soon after that when she began needing more assistance than we could provide her. The decision was made to bring my mother to the hospital. She was immediately admitted to the Hospice floor. She could no longer control her bodily functions and didn’t have the strength to move on her own. I would visit her every day while she slept in her hospital bed. The first time I saw her there, I thought my brother was messing with me, giving me the wrong hospital room, a joke he would pull, as I barely recognized my mother as she lay there on what would become her deathbed. The only way I knew for sure was her; they wrote her name on a whiteboard on the wall beside her bed. She was 65 years old, and the chemo seemed to have aged her 20 years overnight.
Every day, I would come to visit after work. I would sit there, hold her hand, and talk to her about my day. Sometimes, she could put a word or two together but was in and out of sleep the entire time. At this point, the doctors stopped giving her her thyroid medication and gave her morphine to ease the pain. I would stay for about 15 minutes a day. I knew she could hear me when I spoke, but it was hard to see the person who loved me the most in this condition. We knew there weren’t many days left and were prepared to say goodbye.
It was a Wednesday in October when I got the call that my mom only had minutes left. We rushed to the hospital. As we entered the room, she was hanging onto life. As the family was around the bed, sharing our last moments, my sister asked my mother, “Who am I supposed to call when I have a problem?” To everyone’s surprise, my mom responded with the only way my comical mom would respond and answered, “The Ghostbuster!” We were able to share one last moment with Mom.
As she took her final breath, I held Mom’s hand and thanked her. Thanked her for everything she had ever done for me—for giving me life, for loving and caring for me. What I would give to hear her say, “My baby boy,” to me one more time. And by the way, I hated when she called me that. With tears in my eyes, I kissed my mother’s hand and said, “Goodbye.”
As I left the hospital room, holding back tears, a maintenance man carrying a ladder started walking towards me, standing outside my mother’s room. He then began to hammer a nail into the wall right across the doorway from the room that I was just in. He was hanging a picture of an Angel leading about 15 to 20 kids into the gates of Heaven.
Later that night, after a day of making phone calls and spreading the news that she earned her wings, I began to wind down. I decided to smoke a nice-sized blunt and reminisce about the one I just lost. It didn’t quite set in yet that I would never see her again as I tried to clear my mind and relax. I started flipping through the channels and came across the news. Something caught my eye. The story of the night was that a fire started in a building where 15 to 20 children were killed. I instantly remembered the picture in the hospital that the janitor was putting up. Then I realized it: God needed my mother to guide those innocent children into the gates of Heaven.
