I Have Never Loved Someone...

For over two months now, my grandmother has been in the hospital. It goes something like this...throat cancer, stage four, tumor, surgery, removal of tumor, voice box, vocal cords, teeth, lymph nodes, a jugular vein, and then....the long recovery. The last time I visited with her at the beginning of April, she was in the process of recovery. When I was scheduled to return home again was at the beginning of May for my mother's birthday. My mother's birthday coincided with the day we were scheduled to move my grandmother to a rehab nursing home, where she would continue to improve until we could start her on radiation. Sadly, her time in the nursing home only lasted three days before we had to rush her to the emergency room one evening when her oxygen intake had declined significantly. I don't intend to go into the details of my grandmother's trials for this blog, but rather I wanted to focus on what I have watched my mother do over the course of the last two and a half months.

Some afternoons, my mom would call me. She would be exhausted. She'd spend 30 minutes telling me all sorts of details about insurance, nursing homes, medical equipment....things I really didn't understand. And I'll admit, sometimes I was so exhausted from finishing out the semester that I had a difficult time concentrating. And before we realized it,we didn't have the chance to even ask one another how we were both doing in life at the moment before we had to get off the phone. It wasn't until I came home for the last 12 days that I've been fully able to realize just how intense this has all been for my mother...and how much admiration I have for her.

For the 12 days I've been here, I've been exhausted. Some days I can barely keep my eyes open. I've spent countless hours crying. I've spent conversations sitting around dinner asking questions about power of attorney and whether or not to revive my grandmother if her heart stops. While I have lost a number of people I've really cared about in my life, I've never really witnessed the loss of someone slowly...and someone that is as close as my grandmother. And while I've only been doing this for 12 days, my mother has been doing this for over two months now...and she does so much more than I have done.  I honestly have no idea how she is still able to function normally, nor how she kicked my ass in skee-ball when we took a lunch break last week.

That's just it, my mother will always pull through, no matter what. No matter how tired, when I tell her at 10pm at night, "Oh, you should really watch 'I Love You Phillip Morris,' I think you'd love it." She'll sit there holding her eyes open with toothpicks because she wants to share that time with me outside of our visits to the hospital. Despite the fact she spends a majority of her day at the hospital, she still makes sure everyone else is taken care of. And it is astounding. Crazy astounding.

There isn't really a narrative to this blog, but rather, I wanted to acknowledge my mother. How hard it is to be going through this with her own mother. How she amazingly keeps it all together and manages to laugh every time they refer to a particular piece of equipment they use with my grandmother. How when I tell her some petty story about my own life, she always knows exactly the right thing to say.

During my first semester of graduate school, one of my mentor's told me that I handled my first semester with grace, with apparently is rare. I now realize where I learned this skill. Despite all the hell my mom and I have been through in all our years together, this woman has exercised incredible determination and grace the entire time. She is quite simply amazing.

When I thought about songs that reminded me of her....there were dozens. Hell, we've made a lot of memories as you might imagine. But these three seemed to really resonate, although they are written from the perspective of the parent to the child. But sometimes, as we grow older, we share those roles together.

Every time I look down at the tattoo on my hand, I'll always hear my mother say to me, "I love you more than there are birds in the sky."

Three Babies by Sinead O' Connor

Hundreds of Sparrows by Sparklehorse

But perhaps most importantly, this song will forever remind me of my mother, because I have never loved someone....like this...and it kills me every time.

I Have Never Loved Someone by My Brightest Diamond