Connecting with Mom at the end of life
A "same moon" story for my mom and me
Hello, everyone!
Thank you for checking out my inaugural post! This falls under the category of “experiences” and actually bridges some of my old writing to this new topic of sandwich generation life.
And at the end, Dad offers a bonus tip!
All the best to you and yours,
Sarah
A same moon surprise
My mom and I had a somewhat fraught relationship.
I shared this in the eulogy I delivered at her memorial service in September.
It might not seem like the thing to admit to more than 130 of our family’s closest friends and relatives, but I’m no fiction writer. I have what sometimes feels like a pathological desire to explore the truth.
Fortunately, in the last months of my mom’s life, the truth got easier to tell. Because in May, during her hospital stay, things changed.
Those three days, with Dad and me sitting by her hospital bed, my brother popping in via speakerphone, were almost fun. We went back and forth between pumping medical professionals for information and reminiscing, even laughing until the tears came, reliving events from our life together.
Of course there were hard moments, when the extent of Mom’s health problems became clear and we discussed whether to search for causes and cures, or to focus on her comfort. In the end, Mom opted for hospice comfort care. When she was released from the hospital, she and Dad returned to the retirement community apartment they had recently moved into.
In the midst of all of that, somehow—by the grace of God, I believe—decades of Mom’s and my bickering and barbs quite simply stopped. I remember thinking how strange it was that the three days we spent together in a hospital room in Fargo, North Dakota, were going to emerge as one of my favorite family memories.
Back at my parents’ apartment, hospice nurses, a personal care attendant, a chaplain and a social worker began visiting and providing care, assisting Dad, who was her primary caregiver, and the nurses on their floor. I stopped over for visits most days, sometimes finding her on the sofa, sometimes in bed, then more and more in bed, and then exclusively in a hospital bed set up in their bedroom.
For the final three months of her life, she and I interacted in a new way. We shared memories and thoughts, and said everything we needed to say. I took catnaps with her. I enticed her to eat by bringing in salmon-spinach-strawberry salads. And this woman, who had never gone for a massage in her life, let me rub her feet, her neck and her hands. She let me stroke her face and hair. It was as if our hearts joined up in a way they hadn’t since I was a young child.
I count the whole experience as one of the biggest and most mysterious blessings of my life.
When it was time for her memorial service, several of my cousins and a couple of hers made the trip to Fargo. We hadn’t seen any of them in the fourteen years since my grandfather’s burial in Saskatchewan, yet they traveled from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario.
As I visited with my cousin Katherine after the service, I noticed a familiar piece of jewelry hanging on a fine chain around her neck. A glossy black pendant marked with a pure white crescent moon.
I had run across a nearly identical necklace in my mom’s jewelry drawer.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
She told me that her mom, my mom’s sister, had purchased it at a favorite gift shop in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Surely she had given my mom a moon necklace too.
A few days later, I opened the square white box containing my mom’s necklace. I lifted it out and fastened it around my neck. Then I opened the card that had been enclosed with the little moon. It explained that this pendant featured a waning crescent moon, the moon that hung in the sky the day my mom was born, in May 1942.
For several days I wore my mom’s moon. And then it occurred to me to look up my own birthdate, to see what moon I had been born under.
I knew the story of my birth, which had happened two weeks after my due date. Mom must have decided her pregnancy had been a dream, and her firstborn would never arrive. The afternoon before I was born, she and Dad and a couple of their friends drove out to a nearby lake to swim. Then they went out for supper—pizza and beer.
Apparently, that shook me loose, because the next morning she went into labor. What she always shared about that experience was her overwhelming desire for water. The previous day’s sunshine, pizza and beer must have stoked her thirst, but the delivery nurses allowed her nothing but ice chips, which she devoured.
I went online and found a moon phase website, where I entered my birthday, from August 1969. When the result appeared, I learned that just like her, I was born under a waning crescent moon. “The same moon,” I said to myself.
Then I laughed out loud. Just a few years earlier my memoir had been published with that very title. The Same Moon.
In it, I had written about a young baseball player I had met in Japan on a high school exchange program. The night before I left his historic town by the Sea of Japan to return to my home in Minnesota, he had pointed at the moon and said he would think of me when he saw the moon in Japan. And, he suggested, I could think of him when I saw the moon in Minnesota—because it is, after all, the same moon.
As I wrote about my experiences in Japan and reflected on how we encounter similar struggles and successes wherever we go, “the same moon” emerged as the book’s title.
Now learning that my mom and I had each entered the world under the same moon felt like a full-circle kind of coincidence.
After all those years of walking on eggshells, followed by three months of peace, I am thankful to realize that Mom and I had probably always been more similar, more connected, than we ever imagined.
Dad’s tip: A diet worth hearing about
Last week Dad shared an AARP post that says diet can affect our hearing. It won’t replace what we’ve lost from those Friday-night college dances or tantrumming children, but it can support our hearing going forward. Interested? Here’s the link.
Quick question
I’d love to hear whether you are finding an AARP membership helpful. And how old were you when you joined? So far I’ve resisted their offers of free tote bags and car organizers …
The Same Moon (Camphor Press, 2020) is my memoir of running far, far away—to Japan—to find my way home. It’s available from many online booksellers.
Awesome story 💕. I have a similar one about my parents and childhood (they are living still). As far as AARP, Andy turns 55 next year and has been getting mail from them since 50, but resisted opting in. I’ve thought it was the funniest thing, but now that I’m almost 50, it’s not as humorous. I am completely ready to buy a retirement home in Arizona next year, though, and get almost $30 off our monthly phone bill, when Andy turns 55 next year. Embrace it, I’d say—age has it’s advantages.