Jill's Journal: Humor in heartache
Ever hear the phrase, “If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry?”
Well, that statement is playing out in my life right now.
It was just over a month ago that my mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. It’s progressing faster than what any one of us ever anticipated, and is now requiring her have 24/7 care.
As we await the greenlight for her to enter a nursing home, my sister-in-law Chris is staying with her, caring for her needs, helping her with medications, and meals, personal care and the like.
As much as I’m able, I’ve been making numerous trips across the border to Minnesota to give Chris a break, a moment to focus on her life, a moment to breathe.
This past weekend, I stepped in for a day and night, and I’ll do that again this weekend and when my work schedule allows. I’ll be forever grateful of Chris’ willingness to put her work and her life on the back burner to care for my mom, the woman who’s been her mother-in-law for more than 40 years.
My mom wakes up several times a night, most times because she has to go to the bathroom.
Saturday evening was no exception. As I slept on a mattress on the living room floor just outside her bedroom, her first call out to me came just before 1 a.m. The next was three hours later at 4 a.m.
As I waited for her, I joked to mom that this must be what it’s like when you have kids.
In a sincere response, she said, “It doesn’t hurt down there.”
I giggled a bit to myself, and then clarified, “No, I meant getting up in the middle of the night when you have kids.”
It’s moments like that in which humor helps us through the heartache of seeing the woman whose been the rock of our family since my dad’s passing 14 years go, become weaker by the day.
She’s tired – a lot.
Her ability to pull in full breaths of air has become more and more difficult.
The bulk of her days and sometimes the wee hours of the morning are spent in a lift recliner that my brother recently secured for her.
And she prays – a lot – to the Good Lord to take her to His heavenly home.
As difficult as it is to know she’s had enough, I get it. She’s no longer living a quality life, and I know that I wouldn’t want to live that way either.
As Bob Young, the Brandon Community Foundation’s 2021 Community Spirit Award winner, emphasized on Friday evening, the power of prayer is, well, powerful. It helps us to ease our fears. It helps us to have the strength to be the best daughter, son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren and friends that we can be in difficult times such as these.
These little opportunities to smile and laugh that we are given also help to carry us through these days. Because, if we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.
