Tales of Hospice, my Mom, and my friend, Deb.
Photo Credit: "Liminal Spaces: Sky 2" by Denali Brooke https://www.artlifting.com/products/liminal-spaces-sky-2-denali-brooke
Part 1...Mom
The liminal space of the dying process is a mystery; being in its presence is unsettling but also sacred, a privilege.
I sat with my mother her last two days on this plane of existence. She was a mere shell of the powerhouse of a woman she’d been all her life. She was 5’2”, a tiny little woman who could command a room–nay, a building, a city–with her voice, confidence, and laughter.
Left: Mom, age 19, going to Oregon to work for the summer earn money for college.
Right: Mom, early 20s, riding around with friends.
Alzheimer’s came to her and refused to lift its nasty, dirty claws for six years until death, blissfully, took her.
Yes, there are worse things than death. So many. Alzheimer’s is one of the cruellest.
My mother’s last two years were a misery; she lay and screamed (or tried to her, as her once intimidating voice was reduced to a quiet rasp from overuse), not knowing anyone, trapped in her jigsaw puzzle brain without all its pieces. It was heartbreaking and evil. And nothing could appease her.
Photo: Doing my mother's nails in Hospice.
Eventually her body, which hadn’t walked in a quite a while but was still working, began to shut down, and then, hospice. Those last two days after she wasn’t taking food or water were quiet. She was screaming no longer. She was peaceful, and the meds kept her out of pain.
My father and I sat with her, talking to her, holding her hands. I did her nails, because she’d always been very careful about always having her long nails polished and even. I rubbed lotion into her dry skin. I brushed her still-thick hair.
That last day, my father couldn’t take it any longer. They’d been best friends, true partners, nearly inseparable for nearly 70 years. My husband brought Dad home while I stayed; I didn’t want Mom alone.
It’s like some part of Mom was still aware, however; within a minute of Dad leaving, her breathing changed…a little more ragged. I held her hand and told her she could go, it was okay, we’d be okay, I’d take care of Dad. She took another breath…and then didn’t breathe again.
Photo: Mom and Dad, early 1990s, likely at an Elks/Does function.
Being with her at the moment was a privilege. It was bittersweet, as I didn’t want her to go, but she needed to go. She wanted to. It was beyond time. I felt very close to her that day.
Photo: Me, Dad, Mom out camping. Circa 1975.
Part 2...Deb
Photo: Deb and her canoe at Warner Lake, St. Augusta, late 1990s.
I’m reminded of all this, from 2013 when she died, because this weekend I was once again at the bedside of a dying woman, this time my friend Deb who’d been fighting metastatic breast cancer for a year and who’d been in hospice for two months.
Deb and I met in 1990 or 1991; can’t recall exactly. She and my then-boyfriend, later first husband, worked together at the post office, and started hanging out at Bravo Burritos downtown, the little Mexican restaurant and bar that became, in the 90s, the center of the universe for the artsy, the weird, the outcasts, the gay, the geeky, the super smart, the different, where everyone who wasn’t what today we’d call an “influencer” or athlete hung out. Together. At the same tables. Professors sitting with punks, playing cards with hippie chicks, sharing pitchers with proto-goths and the pudgy D&D guy and the Rural mail carrier woman wearing flannel and Sorrels.
Oh, yeah…that last one was me. Sometimes. Sometimes I was in velvet dresses and Doc Martens. Or short plaid skirts and T-shirts. Or my swimsuit covered up with a sundress on the way back from the beach, still smelling of lake and sunblock. Or my wedding dress (yes, I went there after my wedding.) We LOVED Bravo’s.
Photo Credit: Sheila Oehrlein. Winnipeg Folk Festival, mid-90s.
Deb and my husband became the best of friends. And then the circle grew–so many faces and names from that group in the 90s. It was a wonderful time to be alive. I look back so very fondly on those years of great music, so many gatherings at my house or someone else’s, trips to the beach, and the thousands of hours in Bravo’s or the Java Joint, our coffeehouse of choice (where, in fact, I met the man who became my second husband, but that’s getting ahead of myself).
My boyfriend and I convinced Deb and her good friend Rich to be in our wedding, a Renaissance-affair (90s, remember?) and Deb and Rich were costumed as pages. I can’t recall what I had to bribe them with to do that.
One of my favorite memories of Deb involves a reversal of roles. Deb was my hero; there was nothing she couldn’t do. She fixed my car, she built things (especially with Rich), she was afraid of nothing. Camping with her really upped my game, I tell you (although I cooked the steaks on the fire, which is also weird now because I neither cook nor eat meat, but I digress.) But one day in the mid-90s, she phoned me up to say she needed my help. (MY help? OMG!) There was a bat in her attic apartment, and she wanted it out. But, um, she was afraid of bats. And she knew I thought they were cute.
I felt like Xena the Warrior Princess as I showed up with my thick gloves and a fishing net, and we laughed hysterically as I tried to get the bat into the net so I could release it outside, which I did. I don’t know if she realizes just how bloody happy that made me, that I had to help HER!
Photo: Deb reroofing my garage, mid-90s.
Things came crashing down in a spectacularly Jerry Springer-esque way in 1998. I won’t go into details, but it involved my husband and Deb’s partner, and it rippled outward. Looking back, I know the 90s couldn’t last forever and changes would happen, anyway, but this was a horrible, explosive transition.
Photo: Deb, Rich, Eric, seated from left. Veronica, my stepdaughter, behind the pole, and Rob, standing. My wedding, Sept. 1994.
I moved across the state afterward, got remarried, lost touch with a few people including Deb and we only occasionally ran into each other or corresponded, but then we moved back in 2011. And got back in touch, off and on.
The last couple of years, however, we’ve re-bonded over our multiple cancers (I’ve had 3, the breast cancer is Deb’s second). When she got this latest diagnosis a year ago, she reached out to me for some friendship. She’s always been an extremely, EXTREMELY private person. Her social media accounts are spare, and always about national and local political events, and spreading awareness of issues we should be aware of, in her calm, matter-of-fact, polite wording. Nothing personal. Deb has always worked best alone.
Deb at a gathering at my house, circa 1997.
Over the last year we’ve seen quite a bit of each other, and texted even more so. We’ve connected at No Kings protests. It’s been great, except for the cancer. (Like asking Americans how things are going now: “Oh, great, except for the fascism and cost of living!”)
She’s gone through Hell–again–and sooo much pain. The cancer went to her bones, so she underwent several surgical implants of metal rods in her long bones to bolster them enough to withstand chemo. Even aside from that, the chemo was devastating on her and she was hospitalized several times. Deb’s always been naturally bird-like and thin, though strong, but that’s not the way to start an aggressive chemo program.
Then, in February, she got the word: Chemo isn’t working. Nothing can be done. She may have a couple of weeks left. That was later amended to 2-6 months, but staring at death is staring at death.
The first time I saw Deb in hospice, she was ambulatory with a walker, but had such blurry vision that she couldn’t read and covered one glasses lens with black to try to deal with the blurriness. We could no longer text as we had been because she couldn’t read them. She, a cat lover with five rescues whom she cared for as well as most parents care for children, was terribly concerned about them. Finding them good homes. (Most are in permanent homes now, and the fifth is in a foster home being loved on, but still needs a home.) Her cats were everything to her.
She was still listening 24/7 to NPR, as she’d done for years. (Even yesterday when I visited, it was on in her room, and I was listening to “Wait Wait” while there.)
Photo: Deb at Mississippi River Fest, 1997 or 1998.
Last Thursday, with a mutual friend there to read texts, we made the plan for my visit Sunday. Awesome.
Friday, she took a nosedive. By Saturday morning, I got word from Deb’s brother that she wasn’t responsive and wasn’t taking food or water, and he wanted me to be aware because he saw my name on her calendar.
So Sunday I said goodbye to Deb, my friend of 35 years. She never woke up while I was there, sharing her liminal space, but she was dreaming it seemed. Her hands and feet were moving sometimes. I held her hand for a bit but then she seemed agitated–private person, remember–so I let go and just talked to her.
I talked about the old times. I told her how much she’d taught me, and I thanked her for her friendship. I laughed about the VW bus, the time she and I camped by Duluth and bears destroyed our camp. Camping at Hasheater’s Fest. About the beach, Bravo’s. Riding around in her green VW bus, singing Melissa Etheridge at the top of our lungs, on the way to a friend's gig or just road-tripping. And I told her I loved her, that she’d always be in my heart, and I brushed back her hair.
Photo: Deb's bus and our campsite at Hasheater's Fest, 1996 (?)
Photo: Deb on her VW bus at my house.
Deb is not in the liminal space any longer. She died the morning of May 19, 2026. No more pain.
And speaking of liminal spaces, animals are often very much in tune. I don’t know what they hear, smell, see, or sense in some extra-human-sensory way, but the Hospice cat, Fuzzy, who freely roams the entire building, was curled up against Deb when I arrived on Sunday, and stayed, and from what I hear from others, was still curled up against her hours later. When I’ve been there before, Fuzzy was roaming constantly and rarely in one place. But she stayed in Deb’s bed, touching Deb, comforting her.
Photo: Fuzzy, the Hospice Cat, 5-17-26. On Deb's bed.
Cats, and many other animals, are not afraid of the liminal space. They thrive there, and ferry humans along like Aken and Mahaf. And when the liminal space ends, sending the living back to their everyday lives, perhaps the cat will announce Deb’s arrival in the afterlife, if there is one, with a resounding, “Hey…here’s a good one. Bring her cats and something to build. She was a good friend, a good sister, a good daughter, a good citizen, and a gentle soul of patience. She deserves joy and peace. And a tent.”
Photo Credit: Sheila Oehrlein, Winnipeg Folk Festival
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