The Waters Deep

No matter what happens around me, or to me, as long as I am alive enough to see the sun and the moon rising I can still grow and love and life is amazing regardless of Loss.

This week I stood, once again, over a hospital bed watching my Mom recover from an over indulgence of Doctor Prescribed Medication and Budweiser.  Her face a puffy caricature of the  beautiful high cheek-boned person I knew.   Once perfect lips, dry and cracked and almost undetectable except for the tongue that keeps darting out as she tries to form what I can only guess are words, a hopelessly failed attempt to convince the doctor she has Food Poisoning.  Her eyes yellowed and blood shot, an obvious cry of help from a Liver that seems almost ready to take a permanent vacation from a body that has become way too much work to maintain.  Nicotine stained fingers tinged with a hint of blue, her lungs are not awake enough to take in air but not dead enough to completely stop.

I just want to go home.

I stand there looking at My Dad, who is studying the lines on the floor as if they are going to give him the secret answer to the Universe and think, “You watch her sober up or die.  Not me.  You are the one lying to the doctors.  You know the Truth.  Why will you not share it?”  He catches me staring and I see Fear.  It has rendered him speechless.  I want to slap him.

So I walk to the nurses station and tell them her real story.  The truth that she has been struggling with prescription drug addiction for 15+ years.

Plenty of Fluids later and she has recovered miraculously from ‘Food Poisoning’.  They are going to walk her and then she will be released.  It’s no longer an emergency.  This time I don’t beg the doctor to send her to rehab.  I’m not angry.  I’m not really anything except tired.

The next day we have our ‘day after’ talk where I tell her she’s going to die and ask if that’s the Legacy she wishes to leave behind.  I remind her that her mother died from a cocktail of alcohol and pills.  She cries.  She tells me she’s sorry and it won’t happen again.

It’s the same as always. The only difference this time is that I have let go of the Fear of losing her.  I have let go of the responsibility to try to make her sober.  I have let go.

I hug her like it might be the last time I ever see her, because it might.  I look into her hungover eyes and will her to understand that she is loved.

I walk away without any Fear of Loss and I walk back to my life where the birds are chirping, bees are buzzing, my dog is farting, my kids are calling and my husband is hammering on something in the kitchen.

No loss, except my own life, will kill me.  There is Freedom in that Truth.