Death Watch

*** Reposted from my old site. The first time I posted this, I learned many people had similar stories, or would soon live them. Sending hugs. ***

This is a true and rather dark personal tale of a Christmas Eve haunting. It’s not always funny. Someone dies. There is scarring. It’s like a big nuke bomb right into your Christmas Cheer. It may have aftershocks. But, I haven’t publicly talked about my stepmother’s death for three years. and this year, my lucky friends, is the year.

And I can’t help it that she died this night. (Take that, Christmas cheer!) Read on at your own peril.

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December 23, 2018. Tomorrow morning, before dawn breaks, it’ll be three years since my stepmother passed away. Anyone who knew me and my stepmom during our tumultuous 25-year relationship knows that it was complicated. I’m still unpacking it all.

We became close in the end. In the very end. We made peace. We laughed. We shared stories.

That part is diffcult to package in a way that can be shared. And so, for now, this is everything that happened after she spoke her last words.

Because this haunts me every year, this night most of all, which is in a (very small) way wonderful, because Christmas Eve is a good time to share ghost stories.

So here’s mine.

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J’ai peur, bye. I’m scared, bye.

Those were the last words spoken by my stepmother to my father, her partner of 25 years. She tumbled into a coma and never woke up.

She had gone to the hospital 2.5 weeks earlier for stomach pain, and she never left.

#

The day before she slipped into the coma, on the Saturday, myself, my brother, and his entire family, descended on the hospital about an hour and a half away from home. We visited, and chatted, and laughed, and cried some. She drank a bit of coffee, which lifted her mood. There were jokes.

She was doing well, and awake, and alert.

“It was a good day,” we all say on our way home in the December snowstorm. “Maybe she’ll be home by Christmas.”

The next morning, my brother and I cheerfully stroll down the corridor toward her new room. A semi-private room, to boot.

We’re happy for her. A terrible stay will be made more comfortable.

As we walk down the corridor leading to her room, which is at the end of the hall, my stepsister, a stoic, strong individual, steps out, raising her hand to cover her mouth. Her husband, a hunter the size of a bear (with a heart of gold), steps up behind her and gathers her in his arms.

My brother and I exchange a glance. We walk faster.

Yesterday had been such a good day! My mind keeps screaming, but I say nothing. Now is not about me. Now is about my father, and my stepmom’s daughters, and her 12-year old grandchild who is still in the room with her.

We step into the room and we don’t know what to expect. My dad, a romantic and proud man, is collapsed on her bed, crying as he holds her hand. Family members stand around the bed. At this point, we don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. There are none of those wonderfully dramatic heart monitors to reveal the truth.

We take our place near the bed, my brother sliding beside our father to place a hand on his back. I stand on the other side of the bed, supporting another family member.

We exchange a look, then glance at our stepmom. We don’t know if she’s still alive.

She is, it turns out. And would be for another three days, lingering in that space between life and death, pain wrinkling her forehead at times, her breathing growing more ragged, her life slipping away as we watched.

It was rather anti-climactic, in a way. It could have all ended on that Sunday before Christmas. But that wasn’t to be.

And my shift on Death Watch started.

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J’ai peur, bye.

My dad tells me her last words to him, voice breaking. He doesn’t want her to be left alone. He can’t stay with her overnight – he’s got health issues of his own to contend with, and I don’t disagree.

I decide to stay the night, as does my brother. We’re two on Death Watch.

#

Death Watch is really boring, despite the kinda cool name I gave it. You sit there, sometimes speaking to the person, sometimes just holding their hand, and you’re just…there. Just in case. So they’re not alone, because they’re scared and you’re scared and the world is washed in gray with this unfamiliar fear.

We were two, so we split shifts. We’d nap on chairs in the hospital. Get suspicious sandwiches from the vending machine. Make small talk. Wander the hospital halls.

But someone always stayed up, counting beats between breaths.

Someone always had to stay, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, she was conscious enough to know that she wasn’t alone. That although we couldn’t walk this path with her, we would stay by her side as long as we possibly could.

Until the last breath.

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I had a Death Watch break the second night, but came back for the third night. My brother stayed with my dad. My brother was exhausted and had struggled with depression before. I was starting to worry about him, too. And I had to focus on Death Watch.

Non-euthanasia death means that people die slowly. They’re basically shot full of morphine to make them as comfortable as possible, and dehydrated until they die. It’s not humane, it’s not pretty, and it’s not comforting or heroic for anyone involved.

It’s a messy process with poor attempts at sanitizing it and making it palatable for visiting families during the day.

But the Death Watch sees all, when the hospital is dark and silent, when the temperature goes down to save money and keep patients more comfortable, when nurses go around like kind ghosts, laying extra blankets on the dying and those of us on Death Watch.

With the dehydration comes mucus in the lungs, and what I affectionately called the Death Rattle. It still haunts me at times, when I’m in that period between awake and sleeping, and I jerk awake, for a second thinking I’d fallen asleep on Death Watch.

I jerked awake a lot during that night. I stood and stretched, to try to get blood owing again. I’d hold her hand and chat with her, about silly things, or nothing. I’d try to read a book, but Death Rattle shook me back to the here and now, filling my tired brain to full capacity. I tried to write, but Death Rattle crowded out all of my words.

I abandoned a story then and haven’t looked at it since. I hear the Death Rattle when I dare to think about working on it some more. Death Rattle is effective at reminding us all that Death is not to be ignored.

Around 3 am, Death Rattle changed in quality. I don’t even remember quite how, but I remember standing up and kissing her forehead. I took her hand in mine, and I told her that everyone was okay. That we loved her and understood that she had to go. I listed all of the family members, one after another, and told her, “they’re okay. Everyone is okay. We’re okay.”

Why?

This wasn’t wisdom acquired on the spot, but rather, as all great things in life, an idea from Google.

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“How do you know when someone is dead?” My brother whispered to me on our first Death Watch.

I had no answer. I mean, they make it look easy in movies, but it’s really not obvious. We’d spent 15 minutes the day before supporting family members while trying to figure out how to ask if she was actually dead amidst their sobs.

Not yet, would have been the answer. Soon, would have been the lie.

Anyway, thanks to the age of smart technology, we pulled out our phones and looked up a list of ways to tell if people are dead or about to die.

Google, it was not your most brilliant effort.

Then, we checked how to help support people who are dying. That seemed like a good idea, and where I got the idea of telling her everyone is fine, because often the deceasing will cling to life out of worry for their loved ones.

Okay. Cool. I’ve got this, Google.

Well, I ran through a rather extensive list, including the grandchildren twice (just in case), and yet she lived through the night.

When you’re about to embark of Day 3 of Death Watch, you’re not relieved when the Death Rattle settles in its usual rhythm.

You curse Google and get back to trying to stay awake.

#

By now, Christmas is approaching quickly. It’s the 23rd, and we’re making plans to celebrate here, with the grandchildren. The hospital would have lent us a room, while two of us at a time would take Death Watch shifts.

I didn’t sleep that day which, in retrospect, did not help my psyche. But I chatted with one of my nephews about Heaven, and with one of my stepsisters about her mom, and that all seemed more important at that time because Death Rattle stalked my dreams anyway.

My stepsister asked if I could take Death Watch again, since she’d promised her mom she’d spend the night with her over Christmas, and her 12-year-old son would want to stay with her, and she didn’t want him to do two nights in a row.

Well, of course I will. Let me shower, and eat, and pick up some stuff (I hadn’t anticipated staying over three days ago, so was past my prime), and back to the hospital I go.

By then, my brother has gone back home, with my car. I sent him away, since he should be with his kids for Christmas and I was worried about him cracking, too. Only one of us cracking would be enough – he’s always been great at helping me rebuild, anyway.

The day rolls by with visits, laughter, tears, phone calls, strange chats with random hospital people, and wandering the muted hallways, waiting for night to fall.

And for visiting hours to end, and for everyone to leave me alone with a warm blanket and Death Rattle.

I haven’t slept in at least 36 hours, and have been living in grief and helplessness. I can feel the cracks along my brain, imagine my skull filled with nothing but Death Rattle, the cold of the hospital creeping into my bones.

I shake it off, and I chat with my stepmother.

I don’t remember about what. I doubt it was important. I chat because I think she might like to hear something else but Death Rattle, too.

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Just after 3:30 in the morning, the quality of Death Rattle changes. Again, I don’t know how, or why.

This time, I stay seated and look at her. I’d also read that the deceasing at times waits to be alone to pass away, so as not to be a bother.

Try 2, Google.

I wait, and I look, and I’m tired. I’m so tired. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again. Tired is a state of body and mind, and it is now my reality. I will own it, damn it.

I stare, and her breathing slows. It grows more quiet. The rattle releases and, two quiet breaths later, I can no longer hear her breathe.

I wait, and I look.

But I’ve been burned before, and I don’t trust that she’s dead. We of Death Watch are ever wary of traps and fake outs.

We of Death Watch must be ever vigilant.

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I’d always imagined that this type of death would be peaceful, which it was. I also always imagined that it would be obvious.

It was not.

Mind you, after two days without sleep, I doubt anything still qualifed as obvious.

I stand up and go to my stepmother’s bedside. I’m squinting at her and I know it. I’m not crying.

I’m damn suspicious.

As per another Google suggestion: The recently deceased will often relax their facial features, now that the pain and worry has left their earthly coil. Or something equally inane.

I squint at the lines of pain on her forehead. They had noticed us of earlier pain levels, when we’d alert the even more vigiliant nurses to give her more pain killers (which they did, because those are the Rules of Death Watch).

They’re still there, those lines of pain. I squint more. My mind fails to bring up more information or Google ideas. Death Rattle is gone, and it’s left me empty.

So I do the only logical thing in this circumstance.

I poke her forehead to see if it’ll relax. It does not.

The motion of touching someone who, from what my now limited capacities can gather, is quite dead, knocks another idea into my head that Google had not provided: I go fetch the nurse.

She comes, professional, quick, checking with her much more useful equipment and knowledge to confirm my rather grim diagnosis.

I can’t breathe while she checks. I can’t breathe, and I’m looking for my pump in my purse even though I know it’s not my asthma. The emptiness left behind by Death Rattle is collapsing my insides, and I’m out of stamina, and I don’t know how to refill my mind, and I can’t find my damn pump and I can’t breathe while the nurse carefully checks her stethoscope because my stepmom is no longer breathing and it’s over and it’s final and it’s all just beginning.

The nurse turns to me, looks appropriately saddened, and confirms that she’s dead with two simple words: “I’m sorry.”

She’s sorry and I’m sorry and she’s sorry and I’m relieved. And suddenly I can breathe again.

I thank her and pick up the phone. It’s 3:40 am on Christmas Eve, and I wake up my family, and wait for them to come for me.

But they’re 45 minutes away.

I sit in the quiet and wait, feeling strangely empty now that Death Rattle is gone, no longer certain how to fill those empty spaces.

#

Time does not heal all wounds. Trials do not make us stronger.

Trials change us, and time gives us the space to figure out who we now are. Who we’ve become after stepping out of the fire.

It also gives us the chance to redefine pieces of ourselves. When everything is shattered, we sometimes get to rebuild in a different way.

Death Rattle never fully left. I still hear it, sometimes, in that state between waking and sleeping. It’s okay. I make space for it. We spent a lot of time together, after all.

It’s been two Christmases. We’re still all finding our footing, in the wake of the emptiness left behind.

I have yet to visit my stepmother’s grave. I saw where they deposited the coffin at the cemetery. I imagine it’s still sitting on the soil, freaking out visitors. I’m not ready to let that vision go, just yet, because it makes me giggle.

And she’s not there, anyway. I saw what was left behind. If she’s anywhere, something I have no insight into, it’s not in that cold, snow-covered ground.

Life is weird and silly, and unpredictable, not even by Google, and I can’t control death nor Death Rattle, but I now I know that I can sit with it, and wait, and wait, and wait.

And rebuild. And rediscover. And learn to breathe again.

But a part of me stayed behind on Death Watch. And that’s okay. I’m not going to Google how to get over it. It took years and thousands of words to even just mention the experience, to share it in a package that felt right.

And that’s the trick. Rebuilding takes times. And, just like Death Watch, you can only sit with it, and wait. There’s no rushing it (legally), no stopping it (short of miracles), no avoiding it (because life).

I’m hoping you’re not on Death Watch this night. I’m hoping you’re surrounded by love and hope and laughter. Whether you are or not, take a moment. Pause. Find a moment of beauty.

It’s there, somewhere, waiting to be seen. I do it every night that turns over to Christmas Eve. I wait for the light of the morning to break the darkness.

And it will.

It always does.

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I started writing this last year and I still don’t know how to close it. I think there is no closure, that’s the thing. It was a moment. It’s still a moment, somewhere inside of me.

You have moments like that, too.

Maybe in forty years, I’ll come up with something. But not this year.

And so, dear friends, all I can do is bid you good night. I hope you avoid the ghosts. I hope your dreams are free of hauntings.

And I’ll see you in the morning. Good night. And sweet dreams.

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2024 Update

Over pandemic lockdowns, my brother and I tried to visit my stepmom’s grave after my dad dropped dead of a heart attack (but it’s okay - he’s fine now. He was just dead for five minutes). Anyway, we couldn’t find it, and asked dad about it once he’d resurrected. She did not resurrect (unlike my papa), but that’s a story for another day. 💖