Yellow roses

Christmas 2005 was bittersweet. We were at my mom and dad’s home in Roundup for the holidays. Mom had recently fallen in the middle of the night and half of her face was black and blue. This one morning she was sitting in her favorite chair when she reached in her pocket and pulled out a $10 bill. She told me the money was from her sister Ginny, who lived 50 miles away in Billings. Ginny wanted to buy her some flowers for Christmas so she sent the money to mom, who now made the request to me.

I took the money and went to the local florist in Roundup. I knew that $10 was a lot of money to my Aunt Ginny and I also knew that my mom liked beautiful flowers, especially roses. So I added some money to the kitty and brought back a bouquet of roses for mom. She was surprised and said, “I don’t think you got these roses with the money Ginny sent.”

I shook my head and told her that it wasn’t the amount of money, it was the thought. Ginny was thinking a lot about her sister to send $10 for flowers. Both her sister and I wanted mom to have a special bouquet of flowers so we pooled our resources. Did she like them? You bet, and she posed with her flowers like a blushing bride even as her discolored face told the story of how fragile her health had become.  

Mom had a myriad of health problems. She was diabetic and she had congestive heart failure. She ate a handful of pills with every meal and required shots of insulin to moderate her blood sugar. She was receiving invasive treatments at the Roundup hospital to remove the water from around her lungs and heart. This had been done every two months, then every month, now it was every two weeks. She was short of breath and lacked oxygen in her blood so had to be hooked up to an oxygen machine day and night.

Still, it seemed, mom’s family was in denial about how sick she really was. My dad, who had become nothing but skin and bones as mom could no longer cook, kept waiting for her to recover so she could bake him a pie and make meat and potatoes just like she had for 60 years. He wasn’t the only one in denial. Somehow, it seemed, we all believed that mom was somehow going to shake this and get better. After all, when you asked her how she was doing, she always had the same canned answer, “I think I’m doing a little better.”

This mirage would shatter the first week of March of 2006. My sister Janet, who lives in Rapid City, had gone home for a visit. In the middle of the night, mom got out of bed to use the bathroom and collapsed because her blood sugar had crashed. Janet called the EMTs to get an ambulance. Her second call was to me, and I lit out for Roundup – an eight-hour drive.

Upon my arrival, I sat in the hospital room with Janet, dad and mom. Later in the day, Janet left to return to her family in South Dakota. However, before she left, mom told all of us that she had wished Janet hadn’t called for an ambulance and that she had died last night.

Believe me, that’ll get your attention.

The next day was a Thursday. As I made dad breakfast at our house, he told me he wasn’t feeling well so thought he would stay home from the hospital. So I went to visit mom by myself. When a doctor arrived, he said we had some choices. We could put mom into the nursing home as she needed more care than dad could provide, or we could put mom on hospice and she could go home. The hospice nurses would see her several times a week plus provide other services. The main point, however, was that mom would be going home to die and would never be in a hospital again.

Earlier in her life, mom had worked at Roundup Memorial Hospital as a cook. But now, the hospital had become a chamber of horrors for mom. The nurses were pricking her with needles, the therapists were asking her to do this or do that…and to top it off, a sweater she had gotten for Christmas had been stolen from her room during the night. Mom was perpetually cold. At home, dad had the wood stove burning in the corner of the livingroom and the indoor temperature simmered at about 80 degrees. Still, mom would always be wearing a sweater…about six feet away from the stove. “Willis,” she’d say, “Put another log on the fire.”

When the doctor left her hospital room, I asked mom what she wanted to do. She didn’t say she wanted to be put on hospice. She told me, “I want the second thing the doctor said.” Somehow, it seemed her decision had become “the word that need not be ever uttered.”

To mom, it must have seemed like the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders. She now knew and accepted that she would be dying, but dying at home, in familiar surroundings. The rest of the day, mom sat in her hospital bed and recounted story after story to me. Some of the stories were about my brothers and sisters and some were about hers. It was as if she wanted to share her most hidden secrets, plus she wanted to tell me exactly how she wanted her memorial service and where she wanted to be buried in the Roundup cemetery…as close to her brother Vern Anderson’s grave as possible.  

I signed the hospice papers for my family and the next day, a Friday, mom went home. The nurses appeared, a hospital bed was set up in my parent’s bedroom and – it seemed – the countdown had begun. Normally, someone on hospice is given less than six months to live. Mom would die in the middle of June…early one Monday morning. In the interim, all of her five children had the chance to see her and support her. My middle brother Randy, for instance, literally spent a month sleeping at the foot of my mom’s bed at night waiting on her every need. During the day, my youngest sister Susan was mom’s shadow. After that, we hired ladies to come in and care for mom. These were some of God’s special angels. They would cook for her, read to her, play cards with her, even sing songs to her.

In May, mom celebrated Mother’s Day and among her gifts were yellow roses from my niece Karen, who at the time lived in Seattle, Washington. Mom loved her roses. A couple of days later was mom’s 82^nd birthday and she received 82 birthday cards…some from the people now reading this blog. But by the first of June, we knew mom wouldn’t be with us long. It was simply a matter of time.

I brought up the flowers because I want you to know her family is still buying her flowers. Probably like you, we buy our deceased relatives flowers every Memorial Day. For mom, it’s roses. However, the flowers are not only a symbol of our love. But they are a remembrance of a wonderful mother and wife and grandmother and cook and housecleaner and army wife who lived through the Depression, who married a soldier in World War II, who bore six children, five of them who lived, who loved every moment of life and never thought about dying until one afternoon in March sitting in a hospital bed.

But if there’s a point to my story, it’s this. The flowers that will always mean the most are ones we give to our loved ones when they are alive. Don’t wait for Memorial Day to think of buying flowers. Valentines Day, a birthday, an anniversary or just-because-you-care-day…are all the best times to remember our loved ones with flowers.