Saying Goodbye

1995 was a hard year. That was the year I said “Goodbye” to my mother. She was 52 years old and had suffered most of her adult life with ulcerative colitis. Getting diagnosed was a torturous process. For over five years, she visited many doctors explaining her conditions and looking for help. Most concluded she was a hypochondriac and that nothing was physically wrong with her. One used the word valetudinarian. That’s a ten-dollar word meaning she was preoccupied with her health. By the time I was 15 years, she was finally diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an auto-immune disorder that she would have for the rest of her life.

Let’s go back before her diagnosis. Imagine yourself as a mother raising three boys in a farmhouse that had only one bathroom. Add to that situation a disease, or sickness, that makes it impossible to control your bowels. Suddenly, you have the urge to “go,” and one of the boys is taking a bath. How mortifying! Now imagine explosive diarrhea, the kind that would embarrass a cow, with a smell that would make skunks run away. Each of her boys had their baths interrupted in this manner. If we were fast enough to get out with a towel, wonderful. If not, we would face the wall as Mom would tell us how sorry she was, how embarrassed she was. It was torture for her. Sometimes she couldn’t drive fast enough to get home from shopping, from church, from wherever, and her clothes would be soiled. Sympathy from her alcoholic husband came in the form of belittling questions such as, “Can’t you tell when you need to go? I can.”

On top of all that, you’ve spent weeks, months and now years being tested, only to have one more doctor tell you, “Mrs. Glover, I can’t find anything physically wrong with you.” Those words, after a while, began to sound like, “Mrs. Glover, it’s all in your head. Stop bothering me.”

Finally, one doctor listened to her symptoms, her issues, and said, I’d like to try a different test. She had two. One was an x-ray with a barium enema and the second was a relatively new procedure (this was in the 1970’s) a colonoscopy. Both procedures were completed while she was awake and she drove herself home after each was completed, two separate trips to Memphis, Tennessee two hours from home. This doctor had listened to her and was able to diagnose a real disease. Imagine her relief to know that something really was wrong, and it wasn’t just in her head.

For the next 20 plus years, she visited many more doctors. Papers were written on her condition. Interns were trained on her. She still had flare-ups, but she carried spare clothes with her, almost always. She understood the disease and was ok with being, “Ok today.” So much so, that in 1984, married to her second husband, and at the age of 42, she gave birth to her fourth son. Joy had returned to her life, but it didn’t last forever. Carrying this son had taxed her body greatly. More visits with doctors followed. New medicines were prescribed. More flare-ups occurred. More hospital stays. It was hard to be Mommy to a new baby from a hospital bed.

After years of experimental medicines to manage her disease, those same medicines began to exact their toll on her liver. It was failing. One of the tests to check her liver was called a punch, or pop, biopsy. Today, a thin needle is used to take a tissue sample from the liver for testing. Back then, the needle was more like the size of a paper hole punch. It left a perfectly round hole in her side. Not a fun procedure.

In 1991, she received a liver transplant and a new lease on life. During the next four years she was able to be the mother she wanted to be, teaching and playing with her blonde-haired, blue-eyed little boy. She was happy, but the liver she had received came with an unhealthy dose of hepatitis. The chemical combinations keeping her alive were now damaging her second liver, the “new one.”

Mom started getting sick again. Hospital stays were becoming as common as doctor visits. They became so routine that the whole family was used to her going in, receiving I.V. antibiotics, getting better, then returning home. It was her “normal” and ours.

The Thursday before she passed away, I spoke with her on the phone. Long-distance calls were a thing during the pre-cellular days. Five hours away, Mom was once again in the hospital. The doctor had taken a punch biopsy of her liver and she was in great pain. The nurse had just arrived with her pain shot. Mom asked me to call back in 30 minutes. I did. When she answered, her spirits were high and so was she. We talked for a long time about what the doctors had planned for her and what she was planning to do when she was released. One of the girls at church was pregnant and Mom was crocheting booties for the baby. We talked about Patrick, my one year old and how fast he was growing. We talked about my brothers, “the boys,” and their families. She then said she was getting sleepy, that the pain shot was taking over. I promised to call again on Friday or Saturday. I love you’s were said and then “Goodbye.”

The next day, my older brother called to say that Mom had gotten septic and died. My last phone call with her had really been the last. That goodbye had been the last. The “I love you” had been the last. At 52, Mom was gone, never to laugh with us again, or cry, never to say, “I warned you,” or “I told you so” again. One of the hardest parts was holding my nine-year-old brother, telling him that Mom would not be back from the hospital explaining why she couldn’t read bedtime stories to him anymore. No more tales of “On the day you were born” with any of us.

Twenty-five years have rolled by since that last goodbye. It’s still not easy.