Thanks to all who have been praying and sending their positive energy to our family.
Mom has been in Hospice for over a week now. Her breathing has been getting much more shallow, but she is holding on. When her breathing became very shallow on the morning of her eighty-seventh birthday, Wednesday, the nurse felt like the family should come because she surmised by the looks of things that Mom only had a few hours. But Mom, fighter that she is, held on until the end of the day and even all day Thanksgiving while we celebrated at my nephew and niece's house. Even today she is breathing steadily, though shallowly.
There were many family visitors and a few others on Wednesday. The music therapist came in and we had a little hymn-sing of Mom's favorites. The nurses decorated the door with ribbons and balloons. It was a nice way to celebrate Mom's life. During the day, my nephew noted how many of his favorite authors lived to be eighty-seven years old. And even Abraham Lincoln noted a famous event "four score and seven years ago." Our famous event that long ago was our Mom's being born to Ruby and John Clemons!
Now as the mundane tasks of everyday life, we must make decisions on whether to stay or get things done that have been neglected for a couple of weeks. So I finally got my hair cut this morning before I made my way to the Hospice. I got here and Mom was struggling a little to breathe. It is amazing that she is still breathing, since the nurses that have been caring for her the last few days have said one of her lungs has shut down.
We don't know what purpose God or Mom have in mind for her not letting go yet, but she is still with us for a while.
I recall about twenty years ago when she had a bout with cancer, she called me in Texas, where I lived at the time. She was so very calm. I was the basket case whose fears needed to be assuaged. She let me know that she would have the treatments and that she would be fine. That turned out to be the case. So what did I know? And now, although, not conscious, she seems to be surviving again. I am more peaceful about this than the cancer . . . perhaps because she was so calm about it back then and she had twenty more years.
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