My Mom, the Three-Legged Collie
Understanding my mom, her death, and the beloved family pet she ushered on to what’s next
Her things are piled up in my dad’s basement. The basement of the man she divorced over twenty years ago. The man that cut the lawn of her abandoned home for months while we waited for the bank to foreclose. The man that brought his friends and coworkers to the house to take canned goods, TVs, cleaning supplies; all abandoned, like the house.
She didn’t mean to abandon the house this way; suddenly, with dishes in the sink, leftovers in the refrigerator. Her final diagnosis, incurable cancer, came just three weeks before she died. Although we knew for those entire three weeks that someday soon (sooner than us, anyway) she would be gone, we were still gearing up for a fight. Two to three years, her oncologist said. Some people live with this for years! Yes, but how long does someone like my mom live with this? I asked the doctor this in a roundabout way. He couldn’t answer.
Who is, was, someone like my mom? The day she died, but before she was gone, I sat talking to my dad in his living room. I was laying, really, exhausted with grief, my body suddenly deserted by the adrenaline that had kept me up for the last 48 hours or so. She was newly in hospice, but she could be there for weeks, we…
