Finding love and grace amid heartbreak and chaos

When I got the text that both of my parents had fallen and had been taken to the emergency room, I felt alarmed and defeated. How could this have happened, I questioned? But I already knew the answer. My father had no doubt tried to help my mother walk and, in their declining health, both had taken a tumble.

I learned quickly that dad had been released but they’d kept my mother. Not because she’d been injured in the fall – miraculously she hadn’t been hurt except for a few deep purple bruises. They’d kept her for observation because, for what seemed to be the hundredth time, she had pneumonia.

Frustrated that I couldn’t get to them right away, I felt satisfied enough that at least mom was in a safer place and under 24/7 medical care. I’d lost count of how many times she’d been hospitalized. What started with a collapsed lung more than two years earlier had quickly become a steep and steady decline as she became weaker with each ER visit. She now weighed only 70 pounds, and it was truly an act of God that she hadn’t broken anything in the fall.

From my home office three hours away, I joined a call with the medical staff. On the call, I learned the full weight of my mother’s diagnosis. With my sister and I on the line and the rest of my family in the hospital room, I listened as the head nurse discussed care options, including hospice. We knew she was very sick, but wasn’t hospice for dying people?

Then, the plain-spoken nurse spoke what none of us had fully grasped until that moment: There is no cure for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and mom was in the final stages of it. The frequent emergency room visits could not help her.

How did we miss this? One of the countless doctors she had seen over the years had surely discussed this with her, I rationalized. She just didn’t remember. Or maybe she hadn’t fully understood. Or maybe she didn’t want us to know, to spare us from worrying about something we were powerless to control.

Suddenly and painfully, everything made sense. The extreme weight loss, the confounding bouts of confusion and delirium, the onslaught of respiratory infections one after the other, the crushing fatigue — all of these were symptoms of end-stage COPD.

A painful hush followed the nurse’s words. After a long silence, my brother’s girlfriend, holding the phone on speaker, said, “I’m so sorry.”

On Friday after work, I drove to my parents’ home in West Virginia. They’d released my mother shortly after that phone call and sent her home for palliative care. I found her resting in her bedroom when I arrived, cocooned in fluffy blankets and cushy pillows. The room’s bright pink walls, covered in old family photos, contrasted sharply with my mother’s ever-worsening health. She’d been given anxiety medication to calm her nerves and help her navigate the frightening bouts of confusion that left her mistaking my dad for her own deceased father-in-law.

As we visited, I held her hand and tried to keep a sunny demeanor. We chit-chatted about my drive from Ohio, talked about the weather, and tried to focus on nothing in particular — avoiding what was obvious. After a few minutes, she became restless. With great effort and intention, she suddenly sat up and, looking in my eyes she said, “You’re so beautiful. You’re such a beautiful woman.”

I felt a rush of warmth cover me as the pride radiated from deep inside of her. I felt both modest and proud to be the baby she had made more than 50 years earlier, and a living testament to the mother she had been ever since. She was smiling, and I smiled back at her and said, “Well, I got it from you.”

Then my mother took my hand in her cold, frail ones and said, “Thank you, honey. I love you with all my heart.”

Tears filled my eyes. I tried hard to stop them, to keep her from seeing me upset. But it was no use. The stinging liquid poured over my cheeks under the warmth of my mother’s loving gaze.

“I love you with all my heart too, mama.”

She reached for me gently, and I leaned in wrapping my arms around her tiny frame. I could feel the bumps of her spine in the palm of my hand and her ribcage with my fingertips. My mother’s sharp collar bones pressed into my chest, and I breathed in the smell of her freshly washed hair and the faint scent of Pantene as I held her tight.

I didn’t know how to fix her. No one did. So, I hugged her for a long, long time crying like a baby all the while. She felt so soft, so dainty, so fragile. I wanted to comfort her but realized that it was the other way around.

In the sunset of her life, my mother was the one comforting me, just as she had done a thousand times before. She gently patted my back, soothing my broken heart, and in an instant, I felt every fraught memory dissolve, chased away by her light. Every time I’d felt misunderstood, every argument we’d ever had, every harsh word exchanged — probably more from me to her as a teenage girl, if I’m honest — faded into nothing.

The only thing that existed in the world was that hug sitting on the bed in the too-pink bedroom. In that moment of energy between us, that transfer of love and grace, she’d given me everything I had ever needed and everything I would ever need.

For once she had no fear, no anxiety, no confusion — just love, light, and boundless comfort for her daughter. I didn’t know at the time that we would have a few months left with her. But I did know that in that hug, I was being given an extraordinary gift— her selflessness, her resilience, her joy, and her essence.