I am still dealing with the trauma of trying to help her figure out what was happening to her, during the last weeks of her life. I’ve written about the events, perhaps 100 different times. I’ve revised some copies, but it always just comes out fresh again when I begin, so I don’t revisit any version, there are just too many versions. Here is one that I wrote on March 30, 2025, just about 6 months to the day we took her off life support.
Get Here Now
Mom and Mack called me with a “get here now” phone call at 9:43AM on the morning of September 5th, I was still in bed. Emily was preparing to go away for the weekend with friends, we kissed goodbye. We didn’t know that we wouldn’t see each other again for a couple weeks when she would fly to Phoenix to see me. We didn’t know that she would do so again, not once, but twice.
I arrived in Phoenix the next late afternoon on September 6th. We were admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital on September 14th, but not before the worst week of my life, and right before the worst month of my life.
Mom inhaled her last breath on October 9th at 6:58 PM and exhaled her final breath “on the dot” (as we used to say) at 7:00PM. I was at her bedside at The Ryan House in downtown Phoenix. The Ryan House is a hospice, part of the Hospice Of The Valley. Her official death on her Death Certificate is listed as 7:09PM. That is time the acting director at that time recorded her death. It didn’t take me long after her final moment to leave the room and approach the staff counter to say she was gone. Director Brian entered the room, verified it and went back to the front desk, where at 7:09PM it was entered into the official record.
I was texting everyone the day’s update when it happened. I rushed to put on Free As A Bird as she drew her final breath, was able to get it on within the minute on Spotify. It would the final song Mom heard. It was also the final song she played for our black lab Lisa before she put her down. That always sweetly haunted me. I didn’t plan it out, had to think fast. Played the song on repeat for an hour until Emily arrived from the airport.
Charlene was the first of the community to arrive having offered to pick up Emily. By that point I was, we were, calm and no longer in shock. The “shock” was spread out evenly and spread out over the past several weeks. Charlene had just lost her best friend of 50 years. I had just lost my mother of 52 years.
Emily was in the air on an airplane just above Phoenix when this happened. She happened to be taking photos out the airplane window and captured what we can only assume is Mom’s soul rising up to heaven to be with her mom and dad and brother, and all of those that came before us. Charlene picked Emily up from the airport.
I had the most 1000% positive expierience with the hospice expierience. I could have only done it with the help of the virtual community’s support. And the calmness of the supporting staff. Some people may have a longer hospice stay. Mom was off of life support when she entered, and it was explained to me to expect a week to 10 days for the body to die. They also told me that Mom may hold on until we who were watching over her were “ready”. Mack made his visit to say goodbye a couple days before, I broke down and sobbed with her in my embrace only once bedside, that was the night before she died.
Mom died at 81. She was so young, and there was so zero signs of anything wrong, up until early spring 2024 as she slowly felt symptoms of “aging” and opined that maybe she was done being able to preform at the level she liked. By summer, things snowballed, by early fall she was dead.
6 months later, I still cannot believe she is gone. It has totally wrecked me for the last 6 months as I have been trying to process the grief and trauma. Mostly the trauma. The grief will be around forever, hopefully the trauma will lesson. And it has, as I have been reliving it on an hourly basis for a half a year. But there are constant reminders, like everytime I catch my relfection in a mirror, (as I am wearing her tortoiseshells seeing-eyeglass readers to see). I’m also still monitoring her email account, phone number, but hat’s about to end as her phone number is about to be released back to Verizon and a future recipient of Mom’s calls at the beginning of April.
I’ve been needing seeing-eyeglasses for years. I can’t read without glasses. I’ve been visiting bookstores and libraries for the past 10 years w/out the ability to read any book, unless it has pictures. I always loved tortoiseshell glasses, because of, but could never choose them myself, because of, they were John Lennon’s last pair of glasses. The pair he was killed in.
Mom and I, and my brothers had a strong Beatles connection. Especially Mom and I. She bought me as a gift my first “original” Beatles album, for my 13th Birthday. Introducing the Beatles. She picked it up at Tracks in Wax Records. She then got me a Collecting the Beatles book, and suggested we could begin searching out original Beatles memorabilia together at flea markets and antique shops. This began an obsession that lasted many years for me.
For mom and me, the search was later replaced by collecting interesting porcelain cats at thrift stores. Much more common / satisfying than collecting Beatles memorabilia, which was too obvious a thing to end up in our more common searching grounds of thrift store.
Thankfully I was very close with Mom and continued to be a part of her life in Phoenix long after I had moved away, but thankfully just 2 hours away on a plane. I met her different communities and friends though regularly visits and a lot of communications in between.
In person we were so connected and so deeply that we could easily finish each other’s thoughts.
Below are a selection of personal texts that I received as I spread the news to the community that Mom had died. We used some of the ideas and words from texts from some of those who knew her best for the Obituary. The obit took 2 months to write.
My apologies to those in the community I did not reach out to. It was overwhelming and I did what I could. I never posted anything to my social networks, and have been “off” of Facebook since a couple days after I arrived in Phoenix to assist in what little did we know in Mom’s death. I have slowly snuck back onto FB over the past month, occasionally Liking an event, but the thought of posting as if life was ready to go on has been something I just didn’t feel right doing.
One strange facet of my dealing with Mom’s death/saga was the that the last project I was working on in Oakland before The Phone Call, was laying out the artwork (one of Emily’s bubble photographs) for a band based in Portland. The name of the band is Death Doula. I didn’t know what that /really/ was before I had started the project, I knew, but I didn’t see it as something that was real, because I had never heard the phrase before. I didn’t have time to finalize the layout before I left for Phoenix. Emily had to takeover and send the artwork out the following week. I was too busy transitioning into what would become my role for the couple months: a death doula, with no training.
I sprung into action with the help from a virtual support of a network of friends and family through constant communications with those who I could assemble with so little time and emotional capacity.