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Death Mom

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Casey_03

MyPTSD Pro
I haven't written or spoken much about my mom's death. It happened ten years ago, right when I was about to graduate college.

Last night, for some reason, it hit me like a ton of bricks -- her last moments, the things she said, the feelings she experienced. I started having intrusive thoughts about her final days, and the memories were frighteningly vivid. It was very disturbing. I'd rather not think about any of that at all, but maybe it would help to write some of this out.

I watched her slowly rot, over the course of a few months. She died of lung cancer. Initially, she put on a brave face and tried to be very optimistic -- she wrote letters to all her friends about how she knew she'd beat it and live a very long life. I found those letters after she died and it was the most gut-wrenching thing to read them.

Towards the end, as she got closer to death, she started to lose her mind. It may have been the morphine, or a combination of all the pain medications she was on. But she started accusing my dad of "letting her die" because he didn't want to pay for her treatment. She became enraged with him, and I still remember the hatred in her eyes whenever he came in her room.

Now, there's no reason to believe what she was saying was true. I spoke to her doctors, I knew firsthand that she was getting all the treatment she could, and that she'd had cancer for 11 years before it was detected, meaning she really never had a chance.

But it still kills me to think that she died thinking her own family let her die in order to save money. There was one point she actually looked at me and said, "Why won't anyone save me?" I remember that moment, because my sister ran out of the room sobbing and I was left to try to give her an answer. I honestly don't remember what my answer was. Though i wish I did.

Pretty soon after that, she lost control of all her bodily functions. She'd wet herself and I'd change the sheets, and I'd see the horror in her eyes, and the shame, as her own daughter took care of her as if she were a child. She couldn't speak at this point. So all I had to go on was the look on her face, and her eyes.

Then she started refusing to take the morphine. She made it clear she thought the morphine was fogging her brain and preventing her from communicating things she wanted to communicate. She was so angry when the nurse would come and force her to take the morphine, but the doctors insisted this was normal and that she MUST take the morphine or she'd be in unbearable pain. We went along with what they said, though I now wonder if maybe she did have something she wanted to tell us. Some last words, something important.

I will never know.

I watched her die. I was right next to her. I knew it was coming, so I sat with her. All I remember is saying, "thank you, thank you" over and over again, for hours, sobbing over her. I don't know if she heard me, or if she understood that I was thanking her for being my mother, for giving me life. But she died after I said it, she just stopped breathing.

She was cremated. She never got any sort of gravestone or memorial marker, or whatever those things are called where they keep urns of ashes. She'd said she wanted one, but my dad decided against it. I don't remember why. Last night I remembered that, and it killed me to think she didn't get what she wanted.

I had an urn of her ashes at my grandma's house. But my stupid family members buried it with my grandmother a few months ago, after I'd explicitly told them to leave it, and that it was my urn. That was all I had left of my mother.

I don't even know what hurts the most out of all these things and memories.
 
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