Emotions Rooted In Love

Most of her hair had receded from the chemotherapy and malnourishment; she seemed physically weaker. She was rocking in a red paisley chair. “Patrick, sweetie, I just want to be better.”

On another occasion, while I was watching her during the early hours of morning, just before the sun peaked across the backyard and while my father was sleeping next to her, she sat up and said, “I am so hungry.” As I fed her the chicken broth, and it streamed down the sides of her once soft defined smile now turned loose and tired, she said, “It is so good.” 

Finally, one night in the midst of silence while my wife Margot was watching her and had briefly left her side, my mom suddenly yelled out “Margot!”. Startling her and I both (awakening me from my own sleep) we hurried into the room to find her sitting up—or attempting to—in her hospice bed. I am not sure if she saw us, but she did feel our presence. She looked in Margot’s direction and said, “I love you.” She then went right back to sleep. 

These were the last verbal interactions I would have with her. Why do they still haunt me, or rather, why do they not make me come alive? Let me explain.

When I envision my mother’s death, and I think of it long enough, I do find peace, but mostly I  am revealed a multitude of emotions rooted confusingly in love. No matter how it is experienced, death is hard. No matter what faith one encompasses or does not encompass in God, death is hard. No matter how dignified or undignified a person dies, death is hard. 

There is so much pain involved not only in the degradation of someone’s physical being when they are battling cancer, but also in the care-taking of those emotionally there beside them. I admit there were moments when my mother’s needs frustrated me. They were not needs in the sense of her wants. 

I recall coughing fits that would last upwards of thirty minutes. I remember the frustration I had during them. I so badly wanted to simply hold her and yell “Stop! Stop coughing mom! Please!” I wanted her to stop because I wanted to stop suffering because I was suffering because she was suffering. This was a need, or was it a want? 

A multitude of emotions rooted in love. 

In his book A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The moment my mother ceased to breath, I understood those words. It was not her death that terrified me, but the grief which followed. How would I live without her and how would I deal with what soon pursued internally? I was afraid to be without her because of the physical presence her being fostered within my own life. Without that presence the fear would come forward. It was a question that hosted chaos and anxiety—like something was missing, or rather, is missing.

The last few years of her life were not glamorous. They did not do justice to who she was as a person neither mentally or physically. She was a woman who raised five children and loved one man her entire life so diligently that they were all by her side holding no questions as to whether or not they were ever not loved the night she moved from life to death. Regardless of whether she was physically capable of showing that love in those final years meant nothing; it had already been shown an infinite number of times throughout her life. What was needed was her presence to make us feel connected and as one—to make us feel loved. It is that presence and my inability to move forward at times that causes me fear. Not her death. 

My mother died in love with two men. My father and God. I often wonder if my dad ever felt inferior to her eternal romance, or maybe, rather, if he ever felt challenged by her love of God. I never felt inferior, but I did feel challenged. My mother had such a cornerstone faith in God that I am certain she loved and trusted in him more than her own family, but it was because she loved and trusted in him more than her own family that her own family never felt less loved or second best. There abides the challenge. 

We were all the heart of her joy and the joy of her heart because her heart was a sacrificial one that was guided by her love for God. 

This is how hope is born. Hope is born through love and practiced through faith. We hoped from the moment she was diagnosed with cancer and through all four years of fighting that she would be cured. We hoped because we loved her and had faith in our love of her—she had faith in our love. 

When she conquered the cancer the first time we were not as surprised as much as we were encouraged. When she was re-diagnosed half a year later, but this time with brain tumors, we were not defeated, but encouraged to fight alongside her once more. She knew just as much as we did that beyond all of the madness of the cancer we would be together as a unit, ready. 

As she drew her final breaths I remembered something my wife Margot had said. She felt each time she entered my mother’s room as though she was entering an adoration chapel, or in the Catholic tradition, a chapel where the new covenant is reserved; a place where “heaven kisses earth”. At no other time was this more true than within those final breaths. The word adoration comes from the word adore which is latin for two words: “ad” and “ora”. Translated literally it means to mouth, or as an action, mouth to mouth. 

As Patricia Marie Rivera breathed in her last breaths she breathed in the life through her mouth which she had been given and which she had returned. It was a life rooted in God. She breathed in us there in the room by her bed grasping a piece of her both physically and spiritually. She breathed in the physical presence of God and slowly let go of the life he had allotted her for the sake of eternally breathing in, mouth to mouth, his presence in heaven. Put simply, she adored and was adored. 

Though I am without conclusions as to the questions within my own heart regarding life without her, I am not without her. She exists within the daily offerings I make to those around me. I slept quietly within the safety of her womb for nine months. It was one of her greatest offerings. It was my life. 

The final question that remains is this: “Patrick, sweetie, what are you going to do with it?”