Be not afraid

When my mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia a week ago, we knew it would be her last hospital visit. She broke her hip more than 15 months ago, and she’d lasted longer than anyone thought, living in a nursing home where we could visit her daily.

On Friday, her three children and nine grandchildren gathered in her hospital room. My sister-in-law and her daughter drove in from out of state, a trip they’ve made many times over the last 15 months. Smiley Girl drove to the city where Shaggy Hair Boy has started his intensive grad program, and brought him back. Blonde Niece came: she knows my mother-in-law from all the time she’s spent at our house.

My mother-in-law could still whisper, and she could definitely hear them all, as they talked and joked, crowding around her hospital bed. She knew she was surrounded by family. When I arrived Saturday morning, after a long train ride home from my friend’s beach house, I asked if she’d enjoyed the party in her hospital room, and she whispered that it had been “loads of fun.”

We held the phone to her ear so she could talk to a long-time friend, who assured her that death was "going to be beautiful." My husband’s best friend from high school came up to visit. His cousin drove in from out of town to spend the afternoon. I got the idea of using the iPad to play music, and for the next couple of days, we kept using youtube to find the songs she loved — everything from Marian hymns to the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

She grew weaker. We stayed with her around the clock so that she wouldn’t die alone. My husband and I pretty much lived in her hospital room: my daughter brought us meals, and we used camping mats to sleep on the floor. The nurses stepped over and around us, and they always stopped to chat with us and help us figure out how much longer she had.

Her hospital stay lasted almost a week. The last couple of days, she was unresponsive, but I’m sure she felt our presence as we sat around her — her three children, her out-of-town granddaughter, and me. We used the iPad to play silly games — like guessing the names of songs. We looked up songs from our childhoods, everything from Gilligan’s Island to the folk mass songs from the 1960s. We knew the nurses by then, and they knew us.

Wednesday evening, we’d been keeping watch so long that we were all exhausted. My brother-in-law left to go home and get some sleep. My sister-in-law and her daughter left to buy her the blue dress she’d requested for the funeral. My husband lay down on the floor to take a nap.

I cleaned up the room, tossing away empty food containers. I brushed her hair one last time. I blew up some of the blue hospital gloves so that they looked like balloons and hung them above her head. (Blue was her favorite color.) I straightened the necklace and rosary around her neck. I sat down in the chair next to her with a book, hoping that reading would keep me awake. I hadn’t even turned the page when her breathing pattern changed. She took her last breath.

We are burying her today on the feast of St. Ann. She'll be carried by her grandchildren into the church she attended for more than fifty years. My husband and brother-in-law will be the altar boys in the church where they grew up. The organist will play her favorite hymns. We'll gather, the whole family, to say goodbye.