The Unexpected

My mother is in the hospital again after suffering what doctors are calling a psychotic break induced by prednisone therapy. She spent the past two weeks or so staying awake for 72 hours at a time. Her blood sugars are out of control from the medication, and when she arrived at the ER Friday afternoon, she was, in highly technical medical terms, absolutely bananas. I'm pretty sure the ER staff is still talking about the tiny-boned lady who screamed terrible things at them before they could sink two shots' worth of sedatives and anti-psychotics into her backside. I went to the hospital to see her today, and the first thing she demanded of me was that I bathe her. The nurse gave me a sympathetic look as she darted out of the room. I'm not freaked out by my mother's nudity or her bodily emissions, but the IV line and cardiac monitor leads made the task harder, not to mention her constant flinching and hissing and corrections to the way I was washing her skin or wringing out the washcloth or, you know, breathing. It's not a secret that my mother and I have had a difficult relationship. There have been times when I wished for a different family, for siblings, for witnesses to some of the things she's said to me, for someone to stick up for me when she'd spin one of her stories with me as the villain and herself as the victim. But today, when I saw the way her bones showed beneath her skin, when I saw her distress as she lost control of her bladder and urine ran down her legs, all of that disappeared, and all I felt was this huge helpless love for this woman. I wanted to take her suffering away but I couldn't. All I could do was wash her and dry her and smooth baby powder on her back and tell her jokes about how I pee on myself because of the stupid diuretic I have to take. I made her laugh and distracted her from the indignities of her failing body, and I kept seeing not the bird-boned tiny wrinkled woman with wild hair but the dark-haired beauty of my childhood who loved to dance to disco and thought Donna Summer was the bee's knees. I've been crying on and off since I left the hospital because it finally hit me, after all of our fights and bitter silences and standoffs and threats that I love her beyond all reason, and when she is gone from this world, I will miss her so badly in a way that defies all measurement. I've wasted so much time. Tell your Mom you love her. Do it now.