Mother left, knowing love, laughter
My fierce, funny, beautiful mother died the day before Mother’s Day.
I don’t think I could have offered a better gift than telling the woman I’ll always call Mommy that it was OK to say goodbye.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, any more than Mommy was supposed to suffer a mini-stroke in 2013, be diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2016 and lose the life and memories she’d forged over more than eight decades.
She’d made a Kentucky Derby hat a week before, even though my older sister, Linda, had to cajole Mommy into smiling as she showed it off.
I was supposed to be visiting her for an early Mother’s Day, not rubbing lotion on her motionless hands.
Her hat was on the nightstand. I wanted to tell her more stories, see the love in her eyes one more time.
Instead, surrounded by the family she loved so much we could feel it in our bones, my mother, Helen Louise Barnes Harney, 85, slipped away May 12 to dance in the clouds.
She remembers everything now. I detailed my mother’s battle with vascular dementia in FLORIDA TODAY in March, in a series of stories called “The Long Goodbye.”
She was featured, too, on the March 9 USA TODAY Weekend cover.
Mommy had goosebumps on her arms, my sister confirmed, as the three of us chatted on Facetime about that cover story.
When I said, “Don’t we look great?” Mommy exclaimed, “Yes, we do.”
The outpouring of love from readers was incredible, heartwarming, cathartic.
Two months later, I was in a halfdark nursing home room in Kentucky.
As my mother’s eyelids fluttered, my sister called our brother and her sons.
The family gathered quickly. We sat and stood beside my mom for almost six hours.
Each of us took time to hug her, talk to her, reassure our Mommy and Nanny: We’ll be fine. You made sure of it. We love you.
I put my left ear against her mouth to see if she was still breathing.
My sister leaned over and said, “I love you, Mommy.”
“Go see Daddy,” I said … and at
1:55 p.m., she did.
Though I didn’t expect it, pure joy washed over me.
Joy that she wouldn’t face the worst of what Alzheimer’s and other dementias can wreak on a person. Joy that she didn’t linger, wordless, in a world where she so wanted to talk, laugh, share.
I am most glad that my mother left this Earth knowing, despite the curtain dementia drops over cognition, that she was loved, valued, needed.
By allowing me to tell her story to the world, she put a sweet, vulnerable face on dementia, some form of which one in three Americans over 65 will have when they die.
The first morning after my mother’s death, I woke early in the house I grew up in to see how sunrise looked through her bedroom window.
I realized yet again that those Kentucky fields, that farm, that home base ... that’s where I gained the deep roots of family and the sturdy wings to fly wherever life took me.
I listened to a new Willie Nelson song,
Something You Get Through, which poignantly details the loss of a loved one and what comes after. “Life goes on and on And when it’s gone
It lives in someone new …”
Feeling her beside me, I wrote a eulogy for my mother.
She’d tell you this, I told family and friends: Whatever your belief system is, believe there’s more to life than just living and breathing and one day dying. There is something deeper, more spiri- tual, to life than just going through it day to day — wherever you find that, embrace it.
There’s nothing funny about dementia or old age or illness. But do your best, Mommy said, to laugh, every chance you get. Find the humor in the everyday. Support research into this soul-stealing disease.
I can hear her now: Love each other. Take every opportunity to watch a sunrise or sunset or to learn the names of the birds in your yards. To hold a baby, or a loved pet or to simply sit on your porch and count the stars.
Look for the rainbows after the rain. And smile. Please. Smile.
The evening after my mother’s funeral, family gathered at my childhood home.
I looked over in the corner of the den where my dad used to sit in a beat-up recliner, his grandsons clambering onto his lap to wrestle or simply to snuggle.
My family’s voices in my ears and the ceiling fan still shimmying a little 40 years after my parents installed it, my husband, Doug, sat in that corner now.
Emmylou, 8, my nephew Tony’s daughter, plopped beside Doug, giggling.
I could see my dad. Hear my mother. And Willie, too. “Life goes on and on And when it’s gone
It lives in someone new …” It lives in all of us, I told myself. All of us.
And how good it felt, to just sit there and smile.