A son’s testimony on losing his mother to coronavirus

Then one morning she woke me up before 6 and said: “Hurry up. Let’s go. We’re running late for the doctor.” She seemed coherent, but she was agitated. She said if we didn’t hurry, she was going to get fined. It didn’t make sense. There was no appointment. No doctor’s office was even open yet. I thought maybe the medication was clouding her thinking, or she was trying to rush back to her old life. She was always a busy bee from the second she woke up. She would buzz around the house doing ten things at once, and if you got in her way, you’d get stung. I told her: “Your doctors want you to stay home and rest right now. If you need something, they’ll come see you.” I helped her back onto the couch. She said she was sorry for getting confused, but it started to get worse.

She’d try to leave the house every morning at like 3 or 4 o’clock, but she could barely move. She was a wall walker. She would grab the car keys and inch her way out of the house in her underwear and then collapse into a chair on the porch. She was itching her legs really bad, and she started to get small infections because she was scratching past her layers of skin. She kept talking about how she was late for work, she needs to go work, she’s going to get fined, she’s going to get arrested. She didn’t want to take her medication. She was refusing to eat. Sometimes, she didn’t know where she was. I called my sister in Texas, because she went to nursing school and she knows more about this stuff, and she told me to think of it like treating someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia. She said: “You have to talk to her like a 2-year-old. You have to comfort her and keep her company.” I tried to mix her medication in applesauce and then take a bite to show her. “Look, Mom. We’re eating together.” I made a show of bringing the spoon up to her mouth. I told her it was going to be okay. I put the oxygen on her to calm her down. I tried to make distractions to get her to stop talking about going to work. I was firm and put her in a timeout for trying to leave the house. I sat with her. I told her how much I loved her. I held her tight and cradled her like a baby.

It was too much. We needed help — a full-time aide. Me and her husband started calling the doctors and nurses a few times a day. “I’m not comfortable. I’m not equipped. What do I do? How do I take care of her?”

They sent a nurse out to evaluate. The appointment was for 9:30. I had to get her up and get her ready, but I was scared to wake her, because I never knew if she’d be a little combative or confused or trying to run out of the house. She said to me: “Paul, can you take me to the bathroom?” She was so helpless. I can’t explain. It was gutting. Looking at her was traumatizing. She was 111 pounds. She was losing weight in her face, her legs. She was getting that belly you normally see with starvation. She knew who I was, but it was like her eyes wouldn’t focus. She had that thousand-yard stare. I tried to pick her up, and she couldn’t move her body. She could barely lift her arms. She was just dead weight. I said, “Can you roll over?” I didn’t know if she could hear me. I said: “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m going to get us some help.”

I went to the porch to see if the nurse was there yet, and then I heard this weird gasping sound. I turned around and she wasn’t blinking. It made my heart stop.

The nurse walked in right as I was calling 911. The emergency operator told us to move her to the floor, get her straight. “You need to do CPR.” The nurse couldn’t help do the puffing, because she could catch the virus, so I ended up trying to give my mom the air. Her eyes were gone. It wasn’t her. She wasn’t in there. The ambulance came and they probably worked on her for 20 minutes. The sheriff was there. The house got crowded and we got pushed back. They started taking her out on a stretcher and I was looking to see if they had covered her face or anything. We kept asking if there was a pulse, is she breathing, but they wouldn’t say.

They pronounced her right away at the hospital. The doctor told us it was a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot that got trapped in her lungs. He said it was something you see a lot of with covid. He called it a sudden death, but it didn’t feel that way. She’d been getting carved up a thousand different ways since March. I went to the hospital room and I sat with her body for a long time. I kept her company. I tried to think of something to say, some last words.

We wanted an autopsy. My sister flew in, and we started calling around late that night, getting transferred from one medical person to the next, trying to make the arrangements. We needed answers. This whole thing was a mystery. I had gotten the virus and basically had a bad flu for two weeks. Nobody else in the house got sick. And she caught it and she died? Was it all because of the blood clot? Did the pneumonia factor in? The morphine? The mass on her liver? The weight loss? Some kind of vitamin deficiencies? All of this not knowing had been driving her crazy for two months, and it almost felt like we owed it to her. What happened? Why? How come she never got better?

The hospital and the medical examiners were putting us in circles. The autopsy cost three thousand, and nobody had that. We started scrambling together the money, but they were reluctant to do it because of the risks to their staff with exposure to covid. It went on and on. Her husband is Muslim, and he wanted to respect the body, wash the body, bury it right away. He was being real accommodating, respecting our wishes and putting us first, so he pushed the funeral back three days. But time kept passing, and we weren’t getting anywhere.

Eventually, the funeral day came, and we just had to accept it: It’s never going to make sense. Nothing is solid. She caught the virus and it kept on assaulting her body for months until it was too much to handle.

So, we let it go. We let her be.