Mom, We Hardly Knew You

The anger that blurred each interaction with her is gone, replaced by a wistful melancholy

Perhaps it is the wisdom that comes with age or just the fact that I no longer have the opportunity to talk with her. Whatever the reason, the anger that seemed to blur every interaction I had with my mother for so many years before she passed away three years ago is gone now. In its place is a wistful melancholy; a longing to share just one more conversation, one more laugh, but most of all, one more chance to say I love you. It is the rare occasion now, when I find myself thinking, Oh, I can’t wait to tell Mom about this! I have adjusted to her not being here—for the most part.

It is at those times when I make a discovery about myself; when a light comes on and I come face to face with a truth that heretofore eluded me; those are the times when I literally ache to talk to her. I had become so comfortable with the contempt that I felt for her for years, that I never noticed that it colored every conversation we had. I felt so justified in being angry with her that I took it for granted and in doing so, I took her for granted. Somehow I reasoned that she would always be here; there would be plenty of time for easy conversations and warm exchanges later. Later—after she had done penance for her many egregious sins which I held close to my bosom like so many war medals, the most heinous sin of all being that she wasn’t the mother I wanted her to be.

Myrna Lou Coffin was born in 1939 to a young couple who, in pictures, looked as if they had the world by the tail. All the pictures of my mother when she was a toddler are the portrait of an adored child. She wore the fanciest dresses, matching coats and hats, leather saddle-oxfords and frilly socks. Her radiant personality shone through even in those early photos. She was the picture of happiness in those early pictures. Something happened by the time she was six or seven years old because the smile was replaced by a solemn look and a constant shadow played across her features. In photo after photo, the radiant Myrna Lou was nowhere to be found; replaced instead by the solemn and serious girl who always looked sad.

By the time Mom was in high school, she apparently had learned to bring out that thousand-watt smile on demand. To the casual observer, she appears to be just another carefree high school girl in her high school yearbook photos. She married for the first time at seventeen. The wedding photo of my father and her shows a grinning, nervous groom and a hopeful bride with only the merest shadow of a smile. Their wedding photo must have been a foreshadowing of their union, as they were divorced a short eighteen months later. That marriage, however, started Mom on a whirlwind of relationships, pregnancies and, finally, a marriage to the man she would remain unhappily married to for the next twenty-nine years, my step-father. She had a child with him—my brother, Mike. Unbeknownst to Mike or me, she had another child, too; a daughter she gave away for adoption before she married my step-father. She never told my brother or me about our sister; we only found out about her when she—my sister—came looking for her birth family twenty-three years later. Chalk up egregious sin number one for Mom.

The year I turned thirty, my mother committed egregious sin number two. She left my step-father, ran away to parts unknown with the newfound love of her life, a married man named Steve, who was exactly the same age as me. Rumors were rampant in the small town where we lived about this man Mom was so enchanted with. The rumor mill had it that he was a drug dealer. Whether that was true or not, I never knew; but he did introduce Mom to a banquet table of illegal drugs--cocaine seemed to be her drug of choice. The last time I saw her before she and Steve snuck out of town one night under the cover of darkness, she had the classic look of a drug addict--a skeletal frame and total disregard for her appearance. She had become a stranger to me.

We went for months at a time without hearing from her, only to get a call from her from somewhere on the East Coast—a different place each time—always asking for money. Believing she and her boyfriend would only snort it up their noses, I never gave her money. I resented her for making me make that choice. Another egregious sin on her part and I was not in a forgiving frame of mind. I always felt guilty for saying no to her and that became something else to resent her for. It was so easy to build my tower of resentment; almost effortless, in fact. It was a classic example of “familiarity breeds contempt.” I knew she would always be there, after all, she was my mother, she would take whatever I dished out and still love me in spite of it. In my self-righteous fervor, I doled out the punishment I was convinced she deserved.

And so it was that I let thirteen years pass with only the most cursory communication with her. Truthfully, it would have been more than thirteen years, had it not been for the fact that her husband—the one she left us all for—got sick, very sick. When they received the diagnosis that he had very little time left, they came back to Texas from their self-imposed exile and took up residence at her sister’s house. My mother called me, in tears, to give me the news. She was bereft and I was sad for her. The hardness in my heart for her began to melt somewhat; but not enough that I got on a plane and flew there to be with her. I talked with her on the phone, I listened to her cry and I commiserated with her; but I did not do the thing I should have done which was to be there physically to support her. My pride was too great for that. I will always regret that decision.

In His grace and mercy, God provided my mom and her husband, Steve, with the support they needed in the form of my aunt and uncle (her sister and brother-in-law) and Steve’s mother. I am grateful for that, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that I was too proud to lay aside my hurt to help her through that difficult time. The argument could easily be made that she had failed me in so many ways, so often over the years that it was to be expected that I would hesitate to involve myself in her life again, regardless of the circumstances. In fact, I’m quite sure that I used that very argument to justify my actions to myself at the time. The heart can be very treacherous, particularly when making decisions that are undergirded with a framework of hurt and betrayal. I was angry with my mother for “deserting” us. I wore that anger like a badge of honor until it became so much a part of me that it kept me from making reasonable decisions where she was concerned.

When Steve died, my sister, brother and I rallied around our mother. We all flew in from various places, converging on our mother in her time of sorrow. I know that it was a bittersweet moment for her—she finally had her children back, but at great cost, namely the death of the man she had declared for thirteen years was the love of her life. She said he made her feel loved and he treated her as an equal. I think he saw her for who she was, accepted her and made her feel good about herself; all of which are qualities that, twenty years later, I appreciate with a completely different mindset.
After the funeral, my siblings and I returned to our respective homes, but we had changed. Our mother had touched our hearts. We had spent time together with her once again, after all those years apart. It was impossible to go back to the place we inhabited before.

My mother and I began to spend time on the phone, talking sometimes for hours at a time. I was reconnecting with her; not only with her, but with my siblings, as well. For every hour I spent talking with my mother, I spent two on the phone with my sister, Kathy. We decided to surprise our mother with a visit. Kathy and I traveled to my aunt’s house where Mom was living. The photographs I have from that visit are happy ones. They show the three of us laughing, arms around each other, clowning for the camera. Kathy and I planned the visit because we thought it would be good for our mother, oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t just Mom who needed that reconnection. The time we spent together was needful for all of us. Sadly, Kathy and I were operating under the false premise that time was on our side.

Buoyed by the success of our visit with Mom, Kathy and I began planning another surprise visit, this time including our brother, Mike. We decided that a visit from the three of us would be the best Christmas present we could get for our mom. By this time, Mom had moved into her own apartment. When I called to tell her our plans (so much for the surprise,) she was overjoyed. We managed to pull it off—our own private Christmas, just Mom and her three children. The odd thing was that Mom spent an inordinate amount of time in bed sleeping during our visit. We made the best of it, catching each other up on the separate lives we had all lived for so many years and speculating about the reasons behind Mom’s seeming reluctance to join in our mini-reunion. Apparently, we had all been so disconnected from our mother for such a long time, we failed to recognize the warning signs that would soon become impossible to ignore. Our visit came to an end and we each returned to our own homes, many miles and many hours away from Mom.

Mom had always been a hypochondriac. We joked about the fact that she loved to be sick and her preferred getaway was a stay in the hospital. As we were soon to discover, she had taken her penchant for getting attention by being sick to a whole new level. Looking back, it is so easy to spot all the alarming things that we should have paid attention to, but we tended to chalk most of it up to Mom’s fondness for being sick. In retrospect, we should have been alarmed when Mom called both Kathy and me and finally, even Mike to announce that her doctor had managed to qualify her for Hospice care. I remember telling her that she couldn’t be in Hospice care because she wasn’t dying. She informed me that Hospice wasn’t just for people whose death was imminent, but for anyone who had a disease that would eventually kill them. She had COPD and emphysema, she said, and if she was under Hospice care, she would be able to more easily afford the regimen of medicines which she took for chronic bronchitis, as well as for COPD and emphysema. Stupidly, I accepted her explanation at face value.

Over the next few years, Mom visited me in Houston and Kathy in Albuquerque on several occasions. With each visit, her declining health was noticeable, but not alarming. After all, she was still very active, still drove her own car, and was able to make visits to our homes; and while she might have been a bit less energetic, she was still mobile and certainly didn’t seem to be the picture of ill-health. Kathy and I continued to question her about Hospice. How was it that she was able to stay under Hospice care for years, when Hospice by its very definition is intended to aid those who are dying, we wanted to know. Her answer was that her doctor believed this was the best solution to the problem of paying for the numerous costly medications she took on a regular basis. It wasn’t until Mom started calling us, at the direction of her “friends” with Hospice, to discuss her “terminal” illness that we finally saw the red flags we should have noticed before. By then, she had been under Hospice care for four years.

Kathy and I both attempted on innumerable occasions to speak with the director of the Hospice program in which Mom was enrolled. Almost without fail, our calls were directed to voice mail, where we would leave yet another message for someone to call us to discuss our mother’s condition. Our calls went unreturned time after time. We left directions with our mother to have the nurse call us when she came to see her. The nurse never called. We began to notice that there was a very small window of opportunity to speak with Mom during the day. If we called in the morning, she either didn’t answer at all, or would answer but be too groggy to carry on a conversation. It was the same scenario in the evening. Unless we called her between noon and two o’clock in the afternoon, we weren’t able to speak with her. More calls to Hospice went unanswered and/or unreturned.

Finally, Kathy drove from Albuquerque to Mom’s home in the Panhandle of Texas, determined to speak with someone from Hospice and to get some real answers. Upon her arrival there, she was horrified to find Mom’s cabinets and refrigerator practically bare. Her bedside table, however, boasted a veritable banquet of drugs of every type, shape and color. Although her refrigerator was devoid of anything with nutritional value, it did hold a monstrous supply of liquid morphine. We decided that we had to get her out of there. Kathy carefully explained to Mom that she was taking her back home with her. Mom panicked, saying that she couldn’t leave without checking with her Hospice nurses first. It took all of Kathy’s considerable persuasive powers to convince Mom that she needn’t worry about Hospice, but she was finally able to get Mom to agree to go with her when she promised that they would call Hospice as soon as they got to Kathy’s house in New Mexico.

Back home in Albuquerque, Kathy set about deciphering all of Mom’s medicines—what they were for, how often she took them, and what the dosage was. She carefully catalogued every medicine and went online to check for interactions and counter-indications. What she found was chilling. Many of the medicines had side effects that actually worsened Mom’s conditions, the most alarming of all being the ones that literally caused a lowering of her blood pressure (she had never been diagnosed with high blood pressure) and suppressed respiratory function. Prior to Kathy “kidnapping” her, Mom had free reign when it came to partaking of her bounty of liquid morphine. Once she was ensconced at Kathy’s house, with Kathy monitoring her medicines and administering them as directed on the labels, it wasn’t long before Mom started hallucinating and exhibiting classic symptoms of drug withdrawal.

Within a few days, Mom was admitted to the hospital. At first, we were hopeful. The staff of doctors there evaluated Mom and began weaning her off the numerous narcotics she was taking, as well as weaning her body off the incredibly high mix of supplemental oxygen. The doctors explained how that presented a problem because the muscles controlling respiratory function were in an extremely weakened state, having become accustomed to very high levels of pure oxygen flowing through the cannula. To everyone’s surprise, Mom responded better than expected to the process and even began therapy to help regain her stamina. She seemed to be doing well and we were encouraged, thinking that we had reached her in time.

As soon as the director of Hospice in Mom’s home town realized that Mom was gone, Kathy started receiving phone calls. The director warned her that she had endangered Mom’s life by removing her from their care and insisted that Kathy bring her back home. Kathy informed her that was not even a slight consideration, to which the director responded that she would not be held responsible for whatever happened while Mom was out of her care. When Kathy questioned her about all of the narcotics Mom had unsupervised access to and asked for an explanation of why so many narcotics had been prescribed, suddenly the director had to take another call. Kathy made several more calls to her, or more precisely, to her voicemail requesting Mom’s medical records. She received no return phone calls. Approximately three weeks later, Kathy received a very large package containing Mom’s medical records, which had obviously been edited. Whole sections were missing; obviously sections that were not so easy to edit.

I flew to New Mexico to see Mom, who was still in the hospital. She was clearly doing better physically, but seemed to be slipping farther and farther away mentally. Her doctors were optimistic about her recovery at this point, but did express concern about the damaging and possibly irreversible effects of the long-term use of so many narcotics. They had weaned her off the narcotics, her need for supplemental oxygen was greatly reduced and she was gaining stamina. When Mom insisted to one of the doctors that she had a terminal illness, he pointedly told her that with the proper care and rehabilitation, she could certainly expect to live for many more years. Kathy and I were elated. Mom, on the other hand, seemed to receive the news skeptically. I spent a few more days with her and then returned to Houston, convinced that we would indeed have our mother with us for years to come. She was only sixty-six and it appeared that we had snatched her from the very jaws of death.

Within a matter of days, everything changed. Mom experienced a psychotic episode, claiming there was a rapist roaming the hospital. She called nine-one-one from the phone in her room on two separate occasions. One night, the nurses found her climbing in bed with a patient in another room. She told the nurse she was scared. The next day, she hid behind her door with a glass flower vase and tried to bash a nurse over the head with it as the nurse came in the room. She made call after call to my sister at all hours of the night, crying hysterically. She told anyone who would listen that my sister and I, in concert with our husbands, were plotting to kill her. The hospital transferred her to the psych ward, which only served to push her further over the edge. It’s hard to say what actually caused her death; her body and her mind just seemed to self-destruct within a matter of days.

Ultimately, she began insisting that she couldn’t breathe, despite oxygen levels that were within normal limits. Whether there was an actual physical cause or her psychosis caused her panic to escalate to an unmanageable level, we’ll never really know. But the end result was that she had to be intubated—a risky procedure considering the weakened state of her respiratory system which had been so dependent upon supplemental oxygen. Mike and I flew to Albuquerque on the first flight available. The three of us stayed with her, praying that her body would have enough fight left in it to come off the ventilator. It didn’t happen. She never regained consciousness. We were all there with her at the end, along with her sister and favorite cousin. I don’t know if she knew we were there or not, but I choose to believe that she did. She was always scared of being alone and I have to believe that in those final moments of her life, she knew she was leaving this world surrounded by those of us who loved her.