Asleep

Today my mom didn’t wake up until 12:30pm. Considering she went to be at 9:30pm last night, that’s a lot of sleep – a good 15 hours.

It’s not surprising, though. That’s what it’s supposed to be like, at the end. She’s just supposed to sleep more and more until she sleeps all day long, and eventually passes.

Today is also the first day since she got home from the hospital that she’s spent the day in bed – this is the first time in one year, six months, two weeks and four days that she hasn’t gotten up to sit in her comfy chair in the living room. This is the first time she’s been too tired to get up.

And it’s still not surprising. On Wednesday (her birthday) a hospice nurse put a catheter in because she couldn’t control her bladder. On Thursday she couldn’t remember why she wore glasses, and tried to convince my dad to pull out her catheter because she couldn’t remember what it was for. On Friday she woke up at 11:30am and looked bad all day – in pain and exhausted, but too stubborn to go to bed early. On Saturday we gave her morphine every hour and a half, and she dozed off a lot while we watched TV. She also forgot how to brush her teeth and had a hard time using her fork at dinner.

So it makes sense that today she can’t get out of bed. It makes sense that she can barely speak now, that she’s in more pain, and that she doesn’t want to eat. Sometime in the next few days she probably won’t wake up at all.

And so we’ll move our base of operations to the bedroom – we’ll watch TV, eat meals and hang out with her as she lies in bed. We’ll be here with her until she slips away.