All You Need

Last week, while up with the baby for a 3am feeding, I was reading through a book and came across a quote about love, that it is the only thing you are born with and the only thing you die with. And thus a montage of moments cameA tumbling through my head as I sat there, half awake, in the sort of delirious state that only a parent of a newborn knows.

From December 2010 through to October 2011, I watched my mother die. I watched her body shut down, the pain set in. I watched her flesh melt away, leaving her a bundle of bones, bruises and bedsores. I sat for hours, taking shifts with my sisters and moms close friends, bringing my two young daughters to see her daily.

Those visits were riddled with moments. Violet cuddling with mom. Mom asking to brush their hair. Also with heartbreak, when mom was scared in hospice, calling for company. Never wanting us to leave her side.

I tried to keep working for awhile, since I was pregnant and due in November. But then one day in August, love took over. Every part of me knew that my place was not sitting at a desk, merely six blocks from the hospice where my mother lay dying. No longer did the pending maternity leave matter, nor the EI, or the question of if I have a job to go back to. I realized that all I could give my mom in her last days was love, and the only way I could do that while being true to her and to me was to take a leave of absence.

I got to spend four weeks with her. My back ached, I was dilating, but not going into labour. Juggling the kids, school, childcare and my prenatal care. Finally, on the night that she died, I relied on a very dear friend to come and watch my girls so that both my husband and I could hold her hand while she breathed her last breath.

As my family surrounded my mother after she passed, the nurse commented that the room was so full of love, we were such loving family. And a little voice agreed with her. That's all that mattered.

My mom did not have riches. She had no fancy house, car or clothes. She had no high profile job. She was a stay home mom. She had faults, she had problems of her own. Sure, we all do. What she did have was a circle of close, lifelong friends, one who stayed with us the night she died right to the bitter end. She loved her children and grandchildren. We loved her back. Her very last words were to her granddaughters. She managed a very, very weak "I love you" to all six of them. The seventh, yet to take her first breath.

And so, baby Arwen Rose Anastasia did not come for four weeks after mom's death. And when she came, as I lay with my arms strapped to a bed while what seemed like dozens of people in yellow smocks stitched me up, my husband and sister were there to greet her, with immense love. The kind of love that you take with you through your life, and beyond.