Nothing can prepare you for this...Part 2

In the moments following my mom's death, my mind (and my heart if I recall correctly) were racing. I couldn't process what had just happened. Was she really gone? How could this be? She was supposed to be in here to get fluid removed, not die! This can't be happening. I suppose I was going through the denial portion of the grieving process. But on top of that, I remember looking at my dad and asking, "What the hell do we do now?" Seriously. In my 32 years of life, I had been to countless funerals for friends and family members and visited during more than my fair share of calling hours, but I had never gone through the whole funeral organization process.

Someone really should put a class together on this stuff, cause that's what we needed in the hours following my mom's death. I desperately tried to remember what my mom did when her parent's passed away years ago, but the exercise was futile. They were in Canada while we were/are in the US. My mom's sisters who still live in Canada actually took care of most of the details. Not to mention the fact that she probably tried to shield me from as much of the funeral preparations as possible. So I had nothing to go on based on her past experiences. Thankfully, a few nurses stepped in and offered us some advice. From there, the rest of the morning was pretty much a blur of errand-running.

We left the hospital around 8am that morning and my dad and I decided to tackle the chore of funeral preparations right away. So on about 2 hours of sleep and running on complete adrenaline for most of the day, my dad and I drove around and visited the church, the funeral home, a florist, the cemetary, and a monument company. We ordered things, made decisions on stuff I never imagined I'd have to make a decision on (like picking out a casket, vault and what the prayer cards would look like.) We designed a headstone, upgraded the cemetary plot (to one with a standing headstone instead of a flush one), wrote up her obituary, picked out her final outfit and made more phone calls than I can count.

Within 8 hours, we had pretty much put together the entire thing. You really can't compare it to anything else in life, but now that I've been through it, I can equate it to planning a small wedding, only on steroids. You need the venue, the attire, the officiant, the food, flowers, even a limo. And somehow we managed to get it all done in one day. In a way I was kind of glad we did it that way. It gave me some time to rest up for a few days before the family descended from Canada for the calling hours and funeral. Besides, the past few days had been so hectic. Between hurriedly visiting mom at the hospital at all hours of the night, we were also in the process of laying the footings for our new back deck. It's weird in a way. Catastrophe strikes, but you still have all the other "normal" stuff that needs to get done on a daily basis. Kids still need to be fed, laundry still needs to get done, and projects that were started before all this happened, still had to move forward. The clash of the planned and the unplanned made my head spin and it put me in a funky "limbo-ish" state. I would space out, constantly. I walked into a room and spent more time trying to figure out why I had walked into that room than I did doing what I had stepped in there to do. I felt like a zombie.

So I was definitely looking forward to resting for a few days. The only problem was, I couldn't sleep. Actually that's not completely true. I could fall asleep, I just couldn't stay asleep. After an hour or two I'd wake up and that's when it would hit me again. Some twisted corner of my mind had to remind me over and over again that I was not living the nightmare that I thought I was. She really was gone. My stomach would sink everytime I woke up. As if that wasn't bad enough, my mind would shift into overdrive and it ended up keeping me awake for the next few hours. During that time I would relive her final moments in my head. This would happen every time I woke up. Over and over. It got to the point that I hated waking up. I just wanted to stay asleept (whether dreaming or not) because it was so much better than dealing with the reality of the situation. The whole cycle was draining and frankly I'm really surprised I haven't come down with a cold (knock on wood!)

After a few days of that, my mind switched gears and instead of reliving her last few moments, it started on a quest to find out what death was really like. Morbid? You bet. But I'm a researcher at heart, so I started doing a little digging. In my mind I figured, if I had a better understanding of the whole thing, some information that might clue me in to what she may have experienced at the end, it would somehow make dealing with it a lot easier. It would answer my questions and might make me feel a little closer to her. I was grasping for closure. I spent a lot of time searching the Interwebs and reading about the experiences of others. What I found was enlightening and quite interesting.

to be continued...