My mom's wish comes true

After nearly five years, my mom's greatest wish came true Sunday.

She is now back with her mama and papa. And her husband and her younger son. And all the cats she has known and loved over the years. All back together again.

I told her that when I saw her on Wednesday. Several times in the last year, she had looked at me and asked, "Mama? Papa?" And I had to very gently tell her, "They've been gone a long time. They're in heaven now." Both her mother and father died in the early 1960s. And when I told her that, no matter how gently, she would start crying. But a week or two or three later, she would look at me again and ask, "Mama? Papa?" and we would go through it again.

She was always in her right mind--never had Alzheimer's--but she would forget a lot towards the end.

And I also heard that at night they would hear her crying in her room. "Mama? Papa?" I had to really brace myself emotionally whenever we visited--and for nearly the last five years, we have visited every week or so, driving down from 50 miles away.

Last Wednesday, we visited her in the nursing home for what turned out to be the last time. The stroke she suffered a few days earlier had twisted her face, and she couldn't speak at all now. But I bent down close to her ear and reminded her of something I had said before. I told her that her mama and papa are waiting for her--and so are my dad and my brother. "Maybe when you're sleeping," I told her, "you will see them."

No tears. She lived 88 years, and most of them were pretty good. In September 2005, she fell at home and injured her back. Since then, she has lived in the nursing home. Visit by visit, I saw her condition decline. Sometimes quickly, like when she fell and broke an arm or when she had the first stroke. Five very long years. Long for all of us. Especially for her, lying in her bed or in her wheelchair all that time. She never wanted that kind of life. Never. And those were the cards fate dealt her.

As for me, I truly ran out of emotions several years ago. It became an exercise, a spirit-draining ritual, seeing her decline and being powerless to help her. As her only living son, I tried to deal with everything the best I can. I lived with this all these years. It wasn't easy, but I did it, and I can handle it now, too. When we got the word after getting home from our trip to my wife's sisters and brothers, I simply sat down with my phone and started spreading the word among the relatives.

We go to the funeral home Tuesday morning. The funeral was arranged (and paid for) over four years ago, but there will be work to do. My son said he and his girlfriend will be driving up from Detroit for the service. I called her older brother, who turns 91 this month. He's sorry, he said but he can't come. Physical problems--can't be in a car that long. Don't worry about it, I told him. You visited her when she was in the nursing home, and it made her very happy. They talked on the phone last year, when she was still able to talk a little. I think that came on his 90th birthday. She was so happy to hear his voice again.

For the first few years she was in the nursing home, I would take her on drives around the area--mostly the area where she was raised, on the outskirts of town. The old residents in their tarpaper houses couldn't believe the upscale homes there now. She would look very intently are the homes, maybe trying to peel back the years and see the way things were. We would go out to the farm where my dad was raised and where their first little home was--they look just about the same as they did 50 years ago. That was my first home, too. Then she got pregnant again, and my dad had to leave for Milwaukee and a job at a local manufacturing plant.

The last stop on our drives would inevitably be a little rural cemetery, surrounded by farm fields and forests, where her husband and son are buried. In a couple days, she will be joining them.

The long wait is over. At last, her wish has come true.