I wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t believe me. I can hardly believe it myself. It has, officially, been the worst 2 weeks of my entire life…
It all started two weeks ago today (Sunday)… I received a phone call from the hospital telling me my mother had taken a bad turn and I needed to get there ASAP. My hands shook as I dialled my husband’s number (who was at work)… My mum had been told 6 months ago that she had six months to live… She’d battled through medical problems ever since she received a transplant in 2009. I finally got hold of my husband and he – thankfully – was on his way home from work… So I got my two boys ready and paced the house, waiting for my husband to come pick us up.
We raced to the hospital, calling my inlaws who are overseas to let them know what was happening. I looked up at the sky at one point and I thought to myself “those clouds look like stairs to heaven…”
As soon as we got to the hospital, the senior doctor pulled us into a room. My brother and grandmother were already there. The senior doctor explained that they’d found a massive blood clot in my mother’s abdomen, and she was bleeding internally. They couldn’t operate (as they didn’t believe she’d make it through the operation) and they were giving her blood transfusions, hoping against hope that it might make a difference. My grandmother said “Oh so she might make it through”… Holding onto whatever strings of hope were dangled infront of her…
We entered my mother’s room together and she looked at me and said “This is it”… I hushed her, distracted her with my two boys, but in my heart, I knew that this wasn’t good. The doctors had never called us to the hospital before… And the senior doctor’s words were ringing in my ears “She may have a cardiac arrest. If that is the case, we will not be performing CPR because we feel it will do more harm than good.” We gathered around her bed, and she was in a lot of pain… The nurses kept coming and giving her pain medication, which weren’t touching her pain. The morphine then came out and again, nothing was touching her pain. It was hard to be in her room, seeing her in so much pain, being surrounded by nurses who kept looking at us with sad eyes. They all know – I thought…
Eventually, the pain was too much for my mother, and the nurses decided to sedate her… Prior to her being sedated, she looked at my husband and said “I’m missing The Block!”. Slowly, the sedation started doing its thing and she went to sleep… She was so restless and kept murmuring in her sleep… I kissed my children goodbye and told my husband to take them home… I didn’t know how long this all might go on for and I didn’t want my children to witness anything that might scare them.
So, my grandmother, brother and I sat around her bed, holding her hand… She briefly woke up at one point and looked at us like she didn’t know who we were… She had this scared look in her eyes and it broke my heart… Slowly, her breathing started to change and I knew that it wouldn’t be long…
Just before 2am, less than 12 hours since the hospital called us, my mother took her last breath. We all cried and howled – it was like something deep inside us was released because I can’t even explain the sound that came out of us…
The Thursday following my mother’s death, my brother and I were seated a funeral house, discussing coffins and flowers for my mother’s funeral. It took everything I had in me to keep it together and not cry – I know my brother was the same. I thought of how cruel it was to be planning our mother’s, who was 59 when she died, funeral. We made all the arrangements and walked out and just looked at each other, at a loss as to what to say to each other, just completely dumbfounded by it all.
We sat and made calls to tell people about her funeral, when my husband called me panicking… He’d received a letter from the Department of Immigration, saying that his visa had been refused. I lost it – I will admit – crying and shaking… My mother had just died and now the Australian Government didn’t want my husband to stay in the country… I truly felt like I couldn’t take anymore… my heart was breaking more and more by the day and I was completely emotionally exhausted.
Mourning my mother and ready to fight for my husband, I then had the dreaded task of going through my mother’s personal documents to get everything ready for the lawyers to handle. Going through old photos that made us laugh until we found an ultrasound… The ultrasound was dated 1986 and it was twins! I was shocked and realised that my mother had never told us that she’d been pregnant with twins and lost them. My heart ached for her and I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t have told us…. Now looking back, I wish that was the end of our discoveries.
Going through more and more, I started having questions about my mum and dad. I’d always had questions because of things that had been whispered when I was younger and also when my grandmother had spilled some not so nice history just before I got married myself. Now faced with more information, I realised that for 30 years, I have been lied to… I found out that my dad isn’t actually my biological dad.
Now, instead of mourning my mother, I was mad. I was so incredibly angry with her – she knew she had a time limit and chose to die with her secret… And she was the one who could answer all my questions… I looked at my own children and felt that they were robbed of knowing their true medical history… Now i have to have uncomfortable conversations with my dad, and my mum’s friends to find out the truth… While mourning my mother, I now need to dig through her closet for more skeletons, hoping it might lead me to some answers of my own….
Posted by chelseak, 4th August 2013
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no1ladydj said
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chelseak said
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mel1 said
- 04 Aug 2013
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