My mom looks like she always does when she’s sleeping, or at least while she slept since she got sick. Her face is drawn. The area under her eyes is sunken, her skin pale. I touch her forehead. She feels not cold, exactly, but a little chilly. I pull the covers up over her shoulders. I don’t need to anymore, I guess, but she never liked feeling cold and I don’t want her to be cold now.
I always tried to be there for my mother when she got sick, just as I’d tried being there for my dad, but it was never easy. I was at work when the nurse called and said I should come to the hospital right away.
It was a chilly November morning in 2011.
My mother died and I missed it.
When I started working at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April 2000 as a newsroom clerk, my parents were so proud. I was working for the same paper that had employed Lewis Grizzard. I was excited, too. I’m an Atlanta girl and this is the newspaper my daddy read every afternoon when he got home from work.
Five years later, my job was the thing that kept me from where I most wanted to be — by my parents’ sides while I faced life’s ultimate Catch-22: Mom and Dad were dying and I wanted their pain to end —which meant losing them.
My parents didn’t live to see me turn 40. I always knew that was how it would go. The math just wasn’t on our side, not since the day I was born.
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My mom raised my big sister with the help of my grandmother after her first husband’s death in the late ’50s. Life in the little East Point house was never easy for any of them, I know, but during the 1960s, when single motherhood wasn’t the societal norm, my mother, working two and three jobs, managed to purchase her own home and buy cars for herself and my sister. Then, my grandmother died, my sister got married and my mother despised the idea of a life led alone.
One day, at the Fort McPherson NCO Club, she saw my father down at the end of the bar working a crossword puzzle. Maybe she liked that he was such a quiet fellow. Maybe she found him doing a crossword puzzle at the bar intriguing. Or maybe she found his mustache dashing and irresistible.
My dad had been wed to the Army for almost 25 years. In my mom, he found a strong-willed, outspoken redhead who was used to being in charge of her household and answering to almost nobody. In him, she found a man who was OK with who she was. Maurice Albright and Norma Thompson likely appeared an odd match to strangers and, yes, even to their friends, but as a couple, they worked.
My folks married in 1971, and I entered the picture the next year. Mom was 44. Dad was 43. My sister Vicki was 22.
For years, I wondered if my sister loved me or just tolerated me. It couldn’t have been easy, finding herself saddled with a baby sister after being an only child for so long. Factor in that when I came along, Vicki was a married career woman with a 3-year-old of her own. My niece, Cinnamon, and I were raised more like sisters as children. And yet, Vicki’s role in my life has always been clear to me: She’s my big sister, the one I alternately feared and wanted to impress.
When my mom got sick, Vicki was living in South Carolina and she made the three-hour drive home once or twice a month. We talked on the phone nearly every day — we still do now that she’s moved back to Georgia. But as the one still living at home, I made the decisions regarding Mom’s health care. My sister always supported me, and I often sought her counsel. I’ve come to realize Vicki has always loved me — more than I ever knew — and she’s become my best friend.
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“Quick” isn’t the right word to describe my dad’s death, but he was diagnosed with emphysema in June 2005 and died six months later, a week before Christmas. A smoker all his life, the time had come when instead of holding a cigarette to his lips he held a nebulizer just so he could breathe.
I’d hated my father’s smoking, hated how it woke him at night and hated how my teeth clenched when his cough echoed down the hallway. That cough, I always knew, was the sound of my father dying.
“Daddy,” I said, as we waited for an ambulance to take him to the emergency room when, once again, his lungs couldn’t gather the air most of us take for granted, “I just wish you’d never started smoking, that’s all.”
Sometimes you can’t keep your voice from breaking even if you try, and I never could. His response was, as always, soft and measured. “I wish I hadn’t, either.”
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The truth is that I almost became fatherless when I was 10.
This is what I remember about that January day: Opening a door to the room next to the kitchen. Seeing flames shooting up one side of the wall and across the ceiling. Realizing that the kerosene heater had caught fire. Yelling to my father to come see. I was sent to the neighbors’ for help, and spent the night nearby with my cousins. Late the next day, my mother came for me. But my father wasn’t with her.
When I next saw my father, it was at Doctors Hospital in Augusta a month later. Wearing a mask and special coveralls over my clothing, I peeped in his room in the burn unit, finally allowed in after what seemed like endless weekends spent looking at magazines in the waiting room while Mom or Vicki visited with Dad.
When my mother and I returned to our home on a cold early February day, the acrid smell of smoke hung around like a guest who didn’t know when to leave. By June, for my birthday, my father was home.
I was blessed with 23 more years of my father’s love and guidance. When I catch myself lamenting that we didn’t have enough time together, I remember just how fortunate we were.
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Grieving for someone you love doesn’t start after they’ve died. It begins the moment you realize there’s something different about them.
They’ve lost a step. They’re a beat slower remembering things. They tire more easily. Times when they work outside in the yard, go to the grocery store or just head down the driveway to the mailbox are now mildly unsettling. They could fall. Their blood pressure is a little on the high side. The doctor visits become more and more frequent.
Grieving starts when you can no longer pretend the balance of power hasn’t shifted, that your parents are the ones in charge and you’re still the one deferring.
The days when my mother could step into a car and seat herself slipped past so subtly that I can’t pinpoint precisely the moment when her legs turned against her. After a few falls in the yard and the house, she walked with a cane. Next came a walker. At last a wheelchair.
Lifting my mom’s legs into the car with a swinging motion that we’d perfected, I’d sometimes wonder if she could still feel my hands working, my arms offering what little strength I had. On the drive to the doctor’s office, my mind turned over what it must be like to find yourself unable to walk or move as freely as you’d once been able. It must be frustrating and frightening. I won’t say I didn’t get tired and cranky and selfishly complain while doing these tasks for my mom, but I did consider what she might be thinking.
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The years of hoping “everything would just be OK if” ended Christmas Eve 2009 when my mother suffered a stroke that robbed her of the ability to sit up on her own or move her legs. At first I told myself she would regain partial use of her legs and return home soon. What I learned is that I’m a terrible liar, especially when I’m trying to pull one over on myself. You want to believe there’s something more that doctors can do, that nurses can do, that physical therapists can do. When nothing more is to be done, you feel a little cheated for believing.
The stroke was caused by spinal stenosis, an abnormal narrowing of the spinal canal. Viewing my mom’s X-rays, the doctor pointed out the spinal column and the area of blockage that looked like a thin, dark log stretched across a great white river. There would be no walking again.
I can’t say there weren’t miracles, however.
My mom was still cogent, she still knew who I was and could communicate with me. Except for her immobility and general poor health, she was still my mother in every way, just as she always had been. You have to find the positives when luck isn’t with you anymore. Then again, I wasn’t the one serving a life sentence in a hospital bed, unable to sit up on my own.
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My folks were meticulous in planning for my future well-being. I appreciate that. They saved for my college education, didn’t spend frivolously. My parents paid with cash or check, never letting bills carry over for a lazy month every once in a while. My parents set aside money for all of us to live on. What my parents failed to do was set aside money to die on. My mother never wanted to talk about what we’d do if she or my dad got too sick to...
“Let’s not talk about it,” she’d say in the tone that let me know there wouldn’t be any further discussion on the subject.
Or she would say, “Don’t you ever put me in a nursing home.”
I promised her I wouldn’t. And then I had to do just that.
I set up an estate plan to cover the costs — more than $5,200 a month as a private pay resident in the nursing home. When you can’t save someone you love from death, you try to salvage what remains from the life they built.
On one of my mother’s first days in the nursing home, I sat at her bedside, feeling like I’d failed her in every sense. I was still trying to tell myself that maybe there was some way she could make it back home. I wanted to believe that.
My mother just looked at me.
“I know I live here now,” she said.
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Trust me when I tell you that you do not want me to give you a haircut. Like, ever. But if I had to, I could. It’s one of the little talents I picked up when my mother got too sick to have our longtime hairdresser come to the nursing home.
A simple pixie cut takes only about seven minutes, according to the Internet video I watched. Unless I’m giving it, in which case it becomes a task of epic proportions in which the phrases “OK, it doesn’t look that bad” and “Now don’t be angry” come into play.
“Just leave me some hair,” was my mom’s only request.
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“I’m dying,” my mother said one day.
After a certain point, there’s no use pretending that things will get better. You know they won’t. Your mom knows they won’t. You figure, why lie?
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”
My mother left our house on a stretcher and never came home. For a while, during the two years she was in nursing home care, I’d try to figure out ways that I could bring her back home for just one day, just so she could be in her house one last time, see it again. I wanted to give that to her. Then one day I realized that even if I did manage to bring her home, she would have to return to the nursing home. I felt as if someone had slapped me. How would it feel to spend the day in a place you loved, only to be taken away to somewhere you never wanted to be?
I was sorry for that, too.
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Even the nurses didn’t want to place the breathing tube down my mother’s airway for what would be her last surgery.
While they set up for the task, I tried “coaching up” my mom. She was stronger than she thought, I kept saying, and if she could just hang in there when the nurses did what they had to, it would be over soon.
Two nurses tried intubating my mom twice, but she didn’t have the lung capacity to exhale or inhale enough for them to insert the plastic breathing tube down her throat. It was like watching a nightmare and there I was, holding her hand, trying to encourage her. And she did try her best. She tried to help the nurses do the job they didn’t want to do in the first place because they knew it would be awful for her.
“Stop,” I said, finally. I couldn’t stand what was happening. Mostly, I couldn’t stand myself for letting it go on. The tears that I didn’t care if anyone saw anymore streamed down my cheeks. “Please stop.”
They stopped.
She died three days later.
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There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of my mother and father, that I don’t wish for just one more chance to see them, to hear their voices, to be able to put my arms around them and tell them I love them more than anyone in the world.
There are nights when I can’t sleep, when I’m overtaken by regrets. I want them to know that all those times when I didn’t act like the sort of daughter they must have wished I’d be, it wasn’t intentional. I was just immature, selfish, taking the short view. I wasted a lot of our time together, and we didn’t have much.
On these nights I get out of bed and I go into the living room. I touch the photo of my father as a young boy, I look at the picture of my mother as a stunning young woman of about 19 and I touch that, too. My dad is smiling, his mouth closed; it would be a smirk on anyone other than my father. My mom’s eyes stare directly out at me. She’s not smiling but looks glamorous; she’s all at once alluring and daring you to cross her.
I just couldn’t do it all. I just couldn’t get it all right, no matter how hard I tried. Nobody in our family could. All I know is this: I tried my best and, if nothing else, I was there to help. Sometimes that’s not enough, or it sure doesn’t feel like enough, even if it’s supposed to be. It wakes me up some nights and I think about it, there in the dark.
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The holidays, it’s said, are the toughest time for those of us who’ve lost loved ones. Thanksgiving. Christmas. The start of the New Year. That’s not how it works for me, though.
The days when it hits me hardest come in the quieter months on the calendar, the times when the distractions are few — my father’s birthday in February. My mother’s birthday in April. Mother’s Day. My own birthday in June, which is often only a couple of days away from Father’s Day.
One day, I tell myself, I’ll be able to walk past the Mother’s Day and Father’s Day card displays in the stores and not feel my throat tighten. There aren’t any cards for me to send now. All the “I love you’s” between my folks and me have been said.
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I’ve planted a small garden for the past three years and it’s been relatively successful. Planning the plot, choosing what to grow, preparing the soil — these aren’t tasks that come naturally to me and yet with each successive spring I feel more confident that my efforts will pay off by summer’s end. Gardening offers no quick or easy results for hard work. Sometimes a harvest of disappointment is your reward.
But I spade the soil and I think of my parents, how they once put their springtime efforts into growing the fruits of summer for our family to enjoy. I remember watching my mother turn over fresh, dark soil while my father mowed the small lawn at our old home in East Point. Those were good days for all of us, the best days.
My folks and I never planted a garden together. We should have. Now I do it alone.
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My work hasn’t ended just because my folks aren’t with me. I have this house and yard to take care of, for one thing. And there’s someone else who demands my attention, someone my parents always wanted me to look out for. Becoming my own best caregiver is the next tough task I’ve taken on. I’m finding that it’s not easy, being your strongest advocate and protector.
But I draw strength from the memory of my parents. In the morning, when I look in the mirror, it’s my father’s eyes that greet me. It’s my mother’s thick, unruly hair I try to tame. Whenever I wash my face, brush my teeth or sigh at the way my hair just never wants to cooperate, I realize my parents are as alive as ever.
About the writer
Mandi Albright is an online audience specialist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Since joining the AJC more than 14 years ago, she's worked as an online editor and producer while writing music reviews and blogging as Chop Chick, the AJC's first Braves fan blogger. A native Atlantan, she remembers the days when birthdays meant a cake from Rich's, when there were long-suffering polar bears at the zoo and the main attraction at Six Flags was The Gasp.
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