So here starts the really bad part of May.
Last Mother's Day was the first Mother's Day after my mom died. It was really hard. I wrote a blog about how I had been tripped up buying Ann's Mother's Day gift. That it shouldn't have been a surprise that it was difficult but for some reason I didn't think about how hard it was going to be.
I wasn't surprised this year. I knew the onslaught of "Don't Forget Mom!" was coming and we couldn't do anything to stop it. I'm sure it was harder for Brent than it was for me. The firsts are always hard.
But now here we are. The first Mother's Day where neither one of us has a living mother. Which is bad enough but Mother's Day 2020 is also the last day we spoke to Ann.
You all know I've struggled with the guilt over that conversation for most of the year. She was telling us things she was doing, massage, hair cuts, and I couldn't stay quiet. I told her I just didn't see a way to do massage safely. That if I were still practicing there is really no way I would do it, not right then. (Remember in May last year we were still having a hard time getting PPE for emergency room workers, let alone massage therapists) You cannot give a massage and not be in someone's space. She assured me that she trusted her therapist and was positive she was cleaning well between clients. We dropped it. But she knew that I didn't approve of the choice.
A few days after that call she started to feel unwell. And then 10 days after the first "I don't feel good" she was gone. And she never called to let us know she was sick. We never knew. We had to reconstruct what happened from messages she sent to people. Not us. Others.
I felt a lot of guilt. Would she have contacted us if I hadn't said anything? Did she feel like it would have been admitting she was wrong to let us know she was sick? It really ate at me.
Until I realized that the only thing worse would have been not to say anything. If she had told us all of her plans, and I had thought, that isn't safe and yet kept my mouth shut. She still would have gotten sick. And, honestly, the odds are she still wouldn't have called us. She clearly didn't think she was going to go to bed one night and not wake up. If she had thought it was that serious she would have gone to the hospital. She knew she was sick, she was positive she had Covid, but she was going to ride it out and be fine. She was a nurse after all, she knew how to handle things.
Except, of course, it was that bad, it was worse than she would have realized. And so she didn't call the hospital, she didn't call an ambulance and she didn't call us.
And if I hadn't said anything I would have been left reeling wondering if she would have taken my warnings seriously. If she would have thought, "Well Denise was a therapist and if she doesn't think there is a way to be totally safe, then there probably isn't." I would have lived with the guilt of silence.
Now, I know, of course, that it didn't matter. She did what she was going to do anyway. But at least I tried.
Because that's all we can do in life is try. Silence is worse. She didn't heed my warning, and again, we don't really know if she caught it from the therapist or the stylist or just out running an errand, but we do know that it didn't matter what we said, she had the information and made her own choices. Which is what all of us have done this year.
And always.
But not saying something when you see a danger? When you see something wrong. When you know it could go really badly, or when you just know better from experience. Not saying something at all is worse. It's evil, in my opinion. You can't make someone heed the warning but to not give it is evil.
That's where I've landed a year later.
She didn't call because she didn't think she was going to die. Not because I told her to be careful and she wasn't. She just didn't think that Mother's Day 2020 was going to be the last time we spoke.
Neither did we.
Another first done.
No comments:
Post a Comment