The Music of Her Life.....

This has been the hardest week of my life.

As I work furiously to assemble WWII era songs onto an ipod for my mother, I wonder if I will even make it there on time. 'There' being the hospital where she has existed since September 2010. I wonder if she will even be able to hear them IF I make it there on time. I wonder why I am doing this now when I have had months, weeks and certainly the past several days to do so. The reality of the situation may be just too real now.

It's possible that I don't want to watch her leave this life. The years spent handling her many errands, her desperate and immediate needs and demands, and her numerous doctor and clinic visits wore me out. Nothing was ever right or was ever enough. It just began to make me numb. But, I never stopped loving her. I never stopped hoping that the next time I saw her that we would have an overall positive encounter. She can't speak now, so it's up to me to make this a final positive encounter. As the POA, it is up to me to make the call for hospice and all my siblings are not in agreement about the next inevitable steps. It is ripping my family apart.

I would like to help her leave this life listening to the songs of her youth, her glory days. They are the songs that defined the 'greatest generation'. The generation of so many immigrants who defended our freedom in so many of the most ultimate ways. The generation who may have given us too much because so many of them had grown up with so little due to the Great Depression.

So, I scramble to figure out how to help her exit this world, I realize that writing this blog just made it easier for me to deal with her passing.

Thank you for listening.