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[Expect multiple posts about this over the next days and weeks, but I'm going to put more than one thing in a post, rather than make a couple of dozen short posts.]
My mother's cause of death was metastatic lung cancer; she'd been short of breath for a while but kept insisting nothing was really wrong. Then she fainted on her way to see her doctor on April 14, and her carer and one of her good friends decided to take her to the emergency room instead.
I wish I'd traveled sooner, but last Wednesday Mom told me that I shouldn't come right away, but wait until she was home from the hospital to visit because hospitals are boring. At that point they knew it was cancer, but were talking in terms of weeks or months, and what treatments to consider. Saturday morning (4/19) my brother said we should get there as soon as possible, and we were on a red-eye flight to London that evening. By the time I got there, my mother was a lot weaker, and not up for much in the way of conversation, but she was happy to see me, Adrian, and Cattitude. On the 21st the palliative care team said we should think about whether to send her home or to hospice. Mom wanted to go home, but said that she wanted whichever would get her out of the hospital sooner. Tuesday they told us "24 hours" and that she was too sick to be taken home or to a hospice facility. She died at 2:30 Wednesday morning, with my brother and his partner Linza sitting with her.
Sitting shiva is supposed to be people coming to comfort the mourners. That's part of what happened last night, and it was valuable, but Mom's stepson Ralph asked if Mark or I would be willing to sit on Sunday as well, for the same of my mother's friends from March of the Living (a Holocaust memorial that Mom had been participating in since 2012) could pay a call, and I didn't feel up to that. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, and have my friends comfort me, not listen to more people I've never met tell me how wonderful my mother was. The group had a memorial service for her Wednesday night in Cracow, which was before the funeral.
My mother referred to Holocaust education as her "third career"; she volunteered once to talk about her and her family's experience, and the next time they needed a speaker they asked her again, and she saw work that needed doing and put a lot of time and attention into it. [Put in a link to one of the online obituaries?]
I'm leaning on Adrian for guidance on how some of this can/should work, given that this needs to work for me, her, and Cattitude. Formally, my brother and I are the mourners, but Cattitude and Adrian both love and miss my mother, and she loved them. (Apparently several people who heard her talk about the three of us said things like "Eve was very...open-minded," which is true but misses that my mother loved them both.)
My mother's cause of death was metastatic lung cancer; she'd been short of breath for a while but kept insisting nothing was really wrong. Then she fainted on her way to see her doctor on April 14, and her carer and one of her good friends decided to take her to the emergency room instead.
I wish I'd traveled sooner, but last Wednesday Mom told me that I shouldn't come right away, but wait until she was home from the hospital to visit because hospitals are boring. At that point they knew it was cancer, but were talking in terms of weeks or months, and what treatments to consider. Saturday morning (4/19) my brother said we should get there as soon as possible, and we were on a red-eye flight to London that evening. By the time I got there, my mother was a lot weaker, and not up for much in the way of conversation, but she was happy to see me, Adrian, and Cattitude. On the 21st the palliative care team said we should think about whether to send her home or to hospice. Mom wanted to go home, but said that she wanted whichever would get her out of the hospital sooner. Tuesday they told us "24 hours" and that she was too sick to be taken home or to a hospice facility. She died at 2:30 Wednesday morning, with my brother and his partner Linza sitting with her.
Sitting shiva is supposed to be people coming to comfort the mourners. That's part of what happened last night, and it was valuable, but Mom's stepson Ralph asked if Mark or I would be willing to sit on Sunday as well, for the same of my mother's friends from March of the Living (a Holocaust memorial that Mom had been participating in since 2012) could pay a call, and I didn't feel up to that. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, and have my friends comfort me, not listen to more people I've never met tell me how wonderful my mother was. The group had a memorial service for her Wednesday night in Cracow, which was before the funeral.
My mother referred to Holocaust education as her "third career"; she volunteered once to talk about her and her family's experience, and the next time they needed a speaker they asked her again, and she saw work that needed doing and put a lot of time and attention into it. [Put in a link to one of the online obituaries?]
I'm leaning on Adrian for guidance on how some of this can/should work, given that this needs to work for me, her, and Cattitude. Formally, my brother and I are the mourners, but Cattitude and Adrian both love and miss my mother, and she loved them. (Apparently several people who heard her talk about the three of us said things like "Eve was very...open-minded," which is true but misses that my mother loved them both.)