Mayday Mayday Mayday

6. What is the hardest thing you have ever experienced?

Mom and Me

The month of May is a hard month for me. Four years ago, my mother went into a coma on Mother's Day and she never woke up. She died on May 21, 2008. Less than two weeks later, I was in a foreign country for the first time, by myself, starting my journey for an MFA. My son was 8 months old and had an ear infection and I wasn't there to take care of him. That is a summary of the hardest thing I have ever experienced.

There are details, of course. When the doctor told my father, brother, and me that my mother wouldn't wake up from this coma, we were given the decision whether to give life support or remove it. Our father told us that he would honor our choice. My brother said he couldn't make the choice because, if it was left to him, he would keep her alive forever. My mother told me many times that she did not want to be on life support. So, I made the decision. It took her ten days to die. The nurses would come in with little moistened sponges to dab inside her mouth and my mother's mouth would reflexively suck on the sponges.

After she died, I started having nightmares that my mother was trying to kill me so I stopped sleeping. I went to the doctor. He prescribed Zoloft and Ambien.

Life had to go on. My daughter turned 6 on May 29. Her first year in kindergarten ended. My son developed an ear infection that kept him up late into the night crying. A few days later, I was on a plane to Ireland with my nightmares and grief, leaving behind my father, brother, the yet marked grave of my mother, a sick child, and another just free from school. I knew nobody in Ireland. I found the group at the airport in Dublin and tried to make eye contact. "Make friends," my husband told me. Nobody talked to me. I rode alone on the bus to our hotel in Carlow. I ate breakfast alone. Sometimes I tried to tag along with a cliche of girls, but they all walked faster than me and talked about people I didn't know. Some people were nice enough, but distant. I finally forced a girl as alone as I was to be my friend. Poor Dorina. But she championed along and we wandered the depressing streets of Carlow for fish and chips or a sandwich. I felt extremely alone. I felt like a failure as a mother because I wasn't there to care for my son. I felt like a failure as a daughter because I chose to let my mother die. I felt like a failure as a person, because I could not fit in. There were two beds in my hotel room, one a double and one a single. I slept in the single because the double would remind me that my husband wasn't there.

When I returned from Ireland, life was still going on. Life hadn't stopped in the States. The kids were the same, my husband was the same, the animals were the same. But I wasn't the same. June in Ireland, the sun goes down around 11 PM and rises much too early. The hotel windows had big, heavy, red curtains that blocked out everything and made the room darker than any night on my uncle's farm. When I got home, I could not sleep. The sun through the window blinds gave me migraines. The semi-darkness of night made me grind my teeth. I put a sheet over the bedroom window. I closed all the doors. I hid under the blankets in bed. And, whenever I slept, my mother tried to kill me.