3 months

Today is the three month mark. She’s been gone for three months.

This is what I remember today:

I remember walking in to her room in the ICU, just after she had gotten out of the surgery that stopped the bleeding and removed the tumor in her brain. We had no idea, and I mean no idea, what her mental capacity was. We were told that it was likely that she would be vegetable, that she would have no cognitive function at all.

But my sister and I walked in, and my dad, who had gone in a few minutes before us, said to her, “Here are your daughters, Katye and Rebecca.” And we each said hi to her, and as we did she started to cry. She couldn’t move at all – her eyes didn’t open, she couldn’t move any part of her body, partially because of the stroke and partially because of the drugs they’d given her before and after the surgery – but tears ran down her face.

And that’s how I knew that my mother still knew me. That’s how I knew that my mother still knew she had daughters. That’s how I knew that my mother was in there, somewhere.

I don’t know why I remembered this today. Maybe its because I was lying in savasana, corpse pose, in a yoga class, and that made me think of my mother lying in corpse pose. Or maybe I just needed to remember that, against all odds and against the opinion of her doctors, she worked and pushed and struggled to heal and improve, so she could spend as much time with us as possible. She’s three months gone, but twenty months more alive than anyone expected her to be.