Losing anyone in your life to death, breakup, divorce, whatever, can bring up the same feeling of loss. My Mom was always there for me. She was never a rocket scientist. She was just always there, always constant, always like the most common sense person, always. Oh, she could be a "blue cow" martyr like many of the older generation before the Women's Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s because she was born in 1919. But she was a constant, always there, always ready to help me or talk to me about anything, always a mother and a housewife first and everything else second. So, someone like that can NEVER be replaced and her death hurts s and to leave a big hole in me that will never be filled. I've tried to replace my Mother with my wife or one of my daughters or all the women I have known. It hasn't worked. It cannot work because none of them together or one by one is my mother. So, I walk around with this big hole in me from my Mom being gone.
Maybe it would have been easier if my Mom left when I was three, like my son's mother did. I raised him to adulthood first by myself and then with the help of my 2nd and 3rd wives. He recently graduated college and became a nurse, a BSRN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing). He took care of my Mother in his early 20s. At the time I saw this as mutually beneficial for both of them. I had just gone through a really terrible divorce and custody battle for my then 5 year old daughter when he was 20. I remarried again when he was 21 and knew that my son and his two step siblings had each witnessed a second divorce, which is hell for any kid. Though my second marriage lasted 15 years it ended terribly for my ex and I, and we no longer communicate.
My point of view has always been "adapt or die" so I just moved on and remarried and now have a fourteen year old daughter in addition to my two adult children. Being married three times has not always been easy, but I am a very capable, self disciplined person. To my surprise, I have been happy.
My five year old daughter is now almost twenty two. When she was fourteen, I supported her mother in buying a small ranch in Southern Oregon. My daughter and I had spent about 9 weeks a year together and one weekend a month until she was about 14. Later we kept skiing together and still do though she switched to snowboarding when she was about 16 or 17. She now snowboards with her boyfriend. Sometimes I ski with them while they snowboard in Northern California or Oregon.
My son worked during his twenties as a computer tech building and repairing computers and setting up large LAN networks for companies, and lived with my Mom. They both seemed to need each other. His mother had never been there much for him and so my Mom became his mother. He often talks about just how much he learned about himself and me and about my mother and the family during those times. In a way it seemed to heal his soul from all the changes in his life from age 3 on.
When he was 10 years old and his step siblings were 12 and 14 in 1985 we pulled all the kids out of school and went to Japan, Thailand, India and Nepal for 4 months. We got 5 open ended discount tickets that were good for 6 months. (I don't know if you can still get tickets like these) but they are like stand-by tickets that are open ended. So you will get to your destination as soon as you are able to get a reservation and a seat. College students and people doing research worldwide often used these kinds of airline tickets in the 1980s. So, for example for 6 thousand dollars we got in December 1985 5 tickets with potential destinations of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bankok, Katmandu, and then potentially back through all these destinations. But we never wound up going to Hong Kong as we had intended to go there on the way back. But on the way back 4 of the 5 of us weren't very well so we flew as direct as we could just to get home to San Francisco. This four month trip changed all the kids in a very great way. We all became true International travelers and could never again see the world in the naive way most Americans do who haven't traveled abroad enough to experience the full culture shock of such an experience of being immersed in other very different cultures than our own American culture or regional American culture.
My son met his first wife, who was from Brazil, when he was 28 and married her at 29. She got him interested in Nursing when her best friend (aged 21) died of liver cancer and two of my son's maternal aunts all died within one year. He decided that "he would rather fix people than computers." I thought this was admirable and encouraged him in his new career in college.
Mom was always an emotional "Rock" for the whole family with her amazing intuition, good nature and always helpful attitude. Unfortunately, when my son married, part of the reason was that my mother started to mentally slip away from us all.
In fall 2001, she set a plastic bowl on the electric stove which we had all told her not to use. We had told her only to use the microwave to cook food as she was no longer safe with an electric stove. So when she put the plastic bowl on the electric stove it melted down the stove and caught fire along the stove. Luckily, it didn't catch the floor on fire during the one night she was alone sitting at the kitchen table and praying for the fire not to grow.
That was the end of Mom's independence. She had stopped driving two years earlier at age 80. I asked her why she stopped driving and she told me she no longer felt safe driving a car. But this was the beginning of the end for her as she slipped into full blown senile dementia. Though Senile Dementia and Alzheimer's are slightly different in little ways, the end is always the same. They are both fatal diseases.
I watched my mother slowly become 50 to 100 different people I had never met before, and from 2001 to 2008 she moved further and further away from me and everyone else until 2006 when she didn't know who I or my son were anymore. That was very difficult to take for both of us because she was the last survivor of my nuclear family, as my Dad died in 1985. The best way to say it from my point of view is that I lost my Mom in 2006 but she died in 2008 from pneumonia while in a coma. At the time I was transporting my wife's father's ashes to St. Louis, Missouri and was waiting for a plane change in LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) when the news came. When it rains, it pours.
It is important to understand Mom hadn't known who anyone was for 2 years in the family and life is for the living. If I couldn't keep my wife and youngest daughter in one piece through these two deaths, then it was a lost cause anyway. When I got the news about Mom, standing by my family in the airport, I walked over to the window and looked out on the various planes and shed tears for my mother in public because there was no privacy at that moment. I had them put my mother's body on ice until I could return from my father-in-law's funeral in St. Louis. Life is tough but in life when the going gets tough, the tough keep right on going and the rest fall by the wayside. I was strong enough to keep going in spite of all this.
When I returned to California, I witnessed my mother's cremation. She was a popsicle by then and so I witnessed my mother as a popsicle, kissed her on the forehead to say goodbye and pushed her into the furnace and turned the furnace on. It was so loud that I couldn't hear, so I went outside the crematorium and watched my mother go up the chimney through a one foot wide stovepipe into the air. I thought that Mom would have liked that idea of going out into the air as pure, filtered smoke. Later I received her ashes, which were mostly ground bone fragments that remained after incineration. I kept her ashes in an urn in a velvet covering on my grand piano for about 1 year unti my kids, my wife and I were ready to put her in the ocean. We finally rented a large sailing yacht and put her in the ocean near a spot we all love.
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