Do Not Resuscitate

I ordered a Do Not Resuscitate for Mama.

I signed a DNR Form, authorizing her doctors to let her go when her heart stopped; no more drugs, no more CPR. It was me who ordered to withdraw life support.

Visitors are only allowed in the ICU at certain hours, so I camped outside her doctor's office at the first level of the hospital, near the lobby. I had told my brother and my sister to go home. There was nothing else that could be done.

I find it peculiar that I have no memory of how the DNR Form looked like. I think I might have signed it in the ICU; I couldn't remember that either. I had been made to understand that if Mama survived the night, she would be taken off her respirator, the machine that breathed for her.

Camped in the hospital lobby, I learned it was policy that a family member turns off the machine.

And because we just buried my dad ten days earlier, there was no one else who could do it. I was 28. I should have been planning family trips with my parents, buying them new furniture, trying out new restaurants with them.

Instead, I was signing DNR Forms, picking out coffins and buying memorial lots. Instead, I was haggling with hospital cashiers for the ICU cash deposit. "Sir, I'm a government employee. Sir, I work at IIT. Sir, you can have all my IDs. Sir, I swear to God I will pay the rest tomorrow."

He will not say yes.

I was a child; I did not even know how to plead properly. I did not even know how to insist to the night nurse that I be allowed to stay with my mom in the ICU in her last few hours.

When I talked to my mom for the last time, I whispered that it was okay for her to let go. I told her that she had been tired for too long, that it was time to rest. I promised her that my brother and my sister will both be fine.

I held her hand, just as she did during my grandmother's last moments. Her left hand was almost closed in a half-fist, the way it had always been after the stroke that left half her body paralyzed. For the twelve years following the stroke, she had been living with a disability that had caused her to do for three hours what she used to be able to do in ten minutes. Her other hand looked older than the paralyzed left hand. It had large, protruding veins, and longer nails; the years it spent compensating for the other lifeless one, were creased onto her fingers.

I held this hand, like she did with her own mother's right hand, and I told her what she told Lola. "Don't be afraid. I am here."

Today is my Mama's birthday.

It was also the 22nd when she passed away. She passed away before sunrise, before I had to be the one to unplug her, before I had to have one more memory I would need to forget.

They say our hearing is the last to go before we die. If that is true, then she would have known how I had been like her. She would have known that she did not have to be afraid.

She would have known that the love she loved us with, is the only kind of love we are capable of giving. Never less. Never, even when it meant letting her go.

Despite ourselves.

Written, April 22, 2017