28 Feb Waiting Room

by Hilary Farquhar

February has been a strange month. My mother got shingles at the end of January, which led to a cascade of issues that landed her in the ER. As luck would have it, my sister, who is Mom’s primary caretaker, had a severe case of the flu at the same time, so Mom was at the hospital alone. I drove out and spent the week with her. It was mostly just sitting in her room for 4 days in the observation ward waiting for a room to open (it never did), or for the doctor to come by, or a nurse to check her vitals. 

I returned to Vermont the day after Mom left the hospital, the day she went on hospice care.

Mom has spent plenty of time in waiting rooms these last few years: doctors’ offices, the SSA office, urgent care, the ER. Now, her apartment has become its own kind of waiting room as the end approaches. As often happens, my mom seems to have rallied a bit since hospice got involved. This won’t last, of course, but at the moment  she’s stable, though sleeping all the time. And so we wait . . .  for clarity, for resolution, for resolve, for goodbye. 

I drove out again this week to sit with Mom, but mostly to help my sister, who is overwhelmed right now. Caretaking is hard work, and it rarely falls evenly within families. The day-in, day-out worries have fallen to her, and they’ve taken their toll. She worries she can’t continue being responsible for Mom for some indefinite period. I think that’s the biggest challenge of end-of-life care – there’s so much uncertainty wrapped into the inevitability of death, tumbled together with our fears and inadequacies. If someone said, “This will last for two weeks, or two months,” many of us could say, “I can take this, I can see it through, no matter how hard.” It’s the shifts and stops and swerves from your expectations that feel unbearable.

As I’ve sat with Mom holding her hand, I keep thinking of Wendell Berry’s “I go among trees.” I’ve always loved that poem, but now I think I’m actually beginning to understand it:

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Now is when we make room for waiting, when we let go of expectations and deadlines, when we sit with the unnamed unknown. I hope the fear of what is finally at hand will leave me (and wonder what it fears in me). I hope muddling through is good enough. I hope we can endure this together. I hope Mom has an easy death. I hope I will hear a song when it’s over.