Death’s Betrayal
Well before the passing of my mom, I had already anticipated her death. From the age of 7, I remember watching my dad help her pack her hospital bags, for yet another surgery. In her lifetime, she underwent a total of 7 spinal surgeries and 1 brain surgery, and every single time, I was sure that I would lose her. At the age of 7, I didn’t know much about death, other than the fact that once people died, you never saw them again. I knew that with death, there came pain for those left behind. I learned about this pain through the good ole Hispanic Soap Operas, where there was almost always a character that died either through an accident, crime, or after a surgery.
What seemed as an entertaining and benign drama series, felt like a reality for me, when my parents would tell my brothers and I that my mom had to go through yet another surgery. At the age of 7, I remember thinking that like the soap opera, my mom would probably die. I grieved. I suffered. And I cried during these times….A LOT; usually in my room or in the shower. In front of my parents and brothers, I was simply quiet. I tried to hold in all of the pain that I was feeling because I was scared that if I let it out, it would make my fear a reality.
During the mornings that my dad would drop us off at school, I felt this heavy weight on my chest that I simply could not shake off. In my mind, as I was in school, I could only think that my mom was probably dying during her surgery. When my friends at school asked me what was wrong, I would actually tell them that my mom was either going to or already had died. Because in my mind, that is what happened when people go into surgery. Every time that I got to see my mom after surgery, I would think that perhaps death had forgotten about her; that perhaps God was protecting my mom against death. I was happy but afraid to feel it, let alone experience it, because I didn’t want death to notice that he had forgotten about my mom.
The amount of relief that I felt was indescribable. I still had my mom. As I got older, I simply learned to look at my mom as that person that simply could survive and overcome any situation no matter what. During times in which she would complain about pain and tell us that she was dying, my brothers and I would jokingly tell her that she had been dying for many years according to her yet managed to still stay alive. We laughed at this because it was the truth. This was mom. She had survived so many things. She was going to be just fine. Death happened to other people, not to us. She was fine. She was fine until the day that she wasn’t. The day that my brother called me and told me that our mom had died, I remember feeling a rush of pain and anguish. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. How was this possible? She had survived so many things before. She was fine; actually she was better now than she had ever been before. This was mom. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to her, to us.
Death was not supposed to take her. What happened that things changed? Time stopped. I simply couldn’t believe death had betrayed me, betrayed us, like this. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Even as I looked at her laying on the floor of our apartment, I simply thought she was sleeping and no one knew how to wake her up. As I got on my knees and told her to wake up, she didn’t respond. There was an immense amount of impotence that suffocated my existence at this moment. I looked at her and simply didn’t know what to do. This was what I had feared, since the age of 7. All those times that I thought I would lose her but didn’t. All those times she continued pushing through. And this time, the one time, she couldn’t. For so many years, death felt so distant. It seemed like something that happened to everyone else only. Death wasn’t supposed to happen to us and finally it did.
