There Must Be Some Misunderstanding
There Must Be Some Kind Of Mistake

It's been two months and four days and the words "your mother just passed" still haven't sunken in.

Some days it seems as if she's still there. In her little house that she worked for so long to get. I'll wake up in the morning and picture her sitting at the table having her first cup of coffee. But even this memory isn't correct. I am thinking of her in our old house, where we lived when I was in high school. Long before she knew she was sick. Back when our little lives were so unaffected by something as big as cancer. Every morning she'd wake up early. Go downstairs. Make coffe. And then she'd call up to me through the heating vent. "hey kidamaroo time to get up" always and I mean every day 3 minutes before my alarm was set to go off. It used to drive me crazy. Now I wish I could hear her voice one more time, for ten more seconds. Even if it was at 6:07 am.

For such a long time after she was diagnosed I tried to pretend it wasn't that big of a deal. I never really took the time to understand that all those moments really were worth treasuring. the times we spent pulling weeds. The day we made cookies and watched "desk set" on amc. the day I told her I was in love with Matt and she smiled and told me how happy she was. I guess it was my way of positive thinking, I'm not saying I was right about this, but I just thought if I don't think she's sick she won't be. I know she was happy that her being sick never stopped any of us from living our lives, but looking back on it now I wish I had stayed home more often. Played rummy with her, like I used to when I was little. She always let me call my own rummies and she let me change my mind about what I wanted to discard.

I feel so selfish now, looking back on how I dealt with it all. I was too concerned with the fact that I was losing my mom to think about her. She had to look at all of us everyday and know she was dying. Well, in the begining she was optimistic, we all were. But by the time the drugs stopped working and the doctor told us that her body couldn't handle chemo again I think she began to doubt. I think we all did.

My mother was pronouced dead on October 29, 2005 at 1:24 in the morning. But the truth is she died before that. In the last weeks of her life she slipped away quietly. At first it was just that she was losing weight. Then she couldn't really form sentences the way she wanted to, she couldn't think of the words she wanted to use. Shortly after she started reliving the past in her head. She would talk about people she hadn't seen in 20 years as if they had just stopped by. She was asking about neighbors we had when I was 6. In one very clear moment when I had just gotten off the phone with Matt she asked "how is jeff doing?" Jeff was my boyfriend in high school. It was very hard for me to see my mother like this. My mother is the strongest woman I know. My mother was the woman who taught me how to be a fighter, how to stand up for what I believe in, how to have some integerity. And she spent the last weeks of her life wasting away on the couch and talking about her best friend from 4th grade.

When my mother died she weighed 126 pounds. She was bald and naked. She had over 60 tumors throughout her body. She was not my mother. I looked at this woman, this stranger lying there in the hospice bed surrounded by my family and all I could think was this woman is not my mother. There has been a mistake.