The Devastating Privilege

We both died that day, Mom.
You were just the only one who stopped breathing.

But the grief didn’t begin with your last breath.

It began while you were still here, when loving you meant fighting for your right to die on your own terms.

I knew what you wanted. I knew what you didn’t want. I knew your wishes, and no matter how badly I wanted to keep you here, I would never have gone against them just to make losing you easier for me. Loving you meant advocating for you when every selfish part of me wanted a different answer.

And somehow, in the middle of preparing to lose my mother, I sat beside you and planned your funeral with you.

You planned your own funeral.

There is something so completely fucked up and strangely beautiful about having those conversations with someone you aren’t ready to live without. Talking about what happens after you’re gone while you’re still sitting right there in front of me. Listening to you make decisions about a day I couldn’t even allow myself to imagine surviving.

Someone asked you if you were scared. You said no. And I knew you weren’t. Your faith gave you a certainty about where you were going that I don’t think death could touch.

But you were scared. Just not for yourself. You were scared for us.

You were scared for your family and what would happen to us after you were gone.

And I know you were scared for me.

Because you knew me, Mom.

You knew exactly who your daughter was. You knew how deeply I loved, how completely I attached myself to the people I loved, and how hard I would fall apart when one of them disappeared.

You knew exactly how I would react to losing you. And you were right. 

Because four and a half years later, I’m still doing it. I’m still learning how to exist in a world where you don’t.

And then came those final days.

We were all there. Our family did this together. We loved you together, cared for you together, watched over you together and somehow tried to help one another survive something none of us knew how to survive.

But those last 36 hours, you weren’t awake anymore. You made sounds I still can’t describe without hearing them again.

For months afterward, closing my eyes meant hearing those final 72 hours all over again. Nights were the worst. Silence wasn’t silent anymore. It sounded like you dying.

And then there was the medicine. Every hour, on the hour.

We were responsible for giving it to you. We were told it was keeping you comfortable, and intellectually I understand that. I know what hospice medication does. I know we were easing your suffering. I know we were honoring exactly what you wanted.

But knowing something and feeling it are two completely different things.

Because when you’re the daughter standing there with the medicine, watching the clock and watching your mother slowly disappear, your brain doesn’t always tell you that you’re helping.

Mine told me I was killing my mother.

Every alarm felt like another step toward losing you. And that is a fucking impossible thing to ask of someone’s family.

My last alarm was supposed to be at 4:00. I woke up late. For once, I will forever be grateful that I did.

At 4:06, you took your last breath, and I was there.

You were there when I entered this world, and somehow life gave me the devastating privilege of being there when you left it.

You were there for my first breath. I was there for your last.

There is something beautiful about that, even though it shattered something in me that I still don’t know how to put back together.

People talk about grief as though time slowly carries you away from it. But it hasn’t gotten easier. It hasn’t gotten better. I’ve just gotten better at carrying something that is still impossibly heavy.

And maybe that’s the part you already knew when you told us you weren’t afraid to die, but you were afraid for the family you were leaving behind.

You knew what losing you was going to do to me before I did.

I was your daughter. I would have done anything for you.

And I did.

But loving you enough to stay until your very last breath shouldn’t have meant having to live with the feeling that my own hands helped bring it.