Angel recieves her wings

Sorry for the lack of posts, my mother passed away at 4:20 am on December 8th from complications of Pneumonia. With the holidays, and the wake and funeral,and the all the stuff that goes with the loss of a loved one, I just haven't had time to blog.

I take great comfort in the fact that I got to speak with her twice on the day that she died via phone, she sounded bad , but I didn't think it would come to this.

ALOT of amazing things happened that night and the next day

Mom had alot of health problems,but was a true fighter! All she did in her time of need was give to others. I will miss her very very terribly.

She had beat pancreatic cancer, but when she went in for her first chemo treatment a week before she died, they did a scan and found a tumor in her liver, they said Tye were sure the chemo would take care of it though.Because her immune system was already down and chemo of course made it worse, she was venerable and caught Pneumonia, she would have beat that too but she also has Pulmonary Fibrosis, so her lungs were already in bad shape.

The day that she died I talked to her in the morning while getting ready for work, she said she hadn't slept well at the hospital, she was laughing at the sound of Hudson babbling "no no no" as I changed his diaper.

Something told me to call on my lunch break,she sounded worse, but said she felt better because they gave her a different type of oxygen. i asked if i should come up to see her, she said not too, that I could call as much as I wanted but she was fine....I knew better though, you can just tell sometimes you know?

I went about my day, my dad called at 6pm to tell me that mom still couldn't breathe well and she she actually requested to be put on a breathing tube,in order to do this they had to sedate her, they also moved her to the PICU. Then dad called again at 9pm, he said the nurse told him things weren't looking good, moms breathing was getting worse even WITH the breathing tube, and her blood pressure was 70/50. They were giving her something to raise it.

I got the baby to sleep and took a hot bath to calm myself, about 10:15 or so, Hudson woke up screaming the most shrillest scream I had ever heard, my husband ran to comfort him, I on the other hand was lying in the tub with a real strange feeling.

At 10:45 my father called and said the Bill and I needed to come get him and go to the hospital.We waited for my in laws to come over and watch the baby, then we headed out.

Once at the hospital,we all just had a feeling that this was it.The nurse had told us that they were giving my mom 100 percent oxygen, but she wasn't taking in alot of it.They also had given her the highest amount of blood pressure meds, and she just kept dropping lower, it was clear her body was done and she wanted to leave. In her 63 years she had
fibromayalgia
2 major car accidents
nerve damage
pulmonary fibrosis
Breast cancer
Pancreatic cancer
start of liver cancer
Psoriasis
diabetes

so....you could understand why she may have been tired.

They asked my dad what he wanted to do, he stated that she wouldn't have wanted to be on life support and we both agreed she wanted to go. The nurse hooked her up to a morphine drip, and took off the blood pressure meds.She slowed down her breathing and slowly her heart rate kept dropping.

Here is where something crazy happened. As we were sitting there we kept seeing something in the window, all three of us, but we never mentioned it to each other, the only way all three of us could explain it was, a sheer white flowy fabric moving very slowly and what appeared to be a wing tip. Now granted I was pretty upset, if I was the only one who saw it, then I would have thought I was a bit crazy. But all three of us saw it, here is how I found that out, I saw the thing in the window and temporarily disregarded it, I walked around to the other side of the bed to kiss my moms head "she had her head turned towards the wall" I sort of wished I hadn't went to that side of the bed because she was pale, eyes slightly open, lips dry. It pained me greatly, I walked over to the window to compose my self and to see what the hell I thought I saw in the window, figuring it HAD to be a flag.I looked out the window and there was a wall, no flag, no drifting snow, it hadn't snowed at all that day, no birds, no nothing.As I'm standing there my husband asks" is there a flag out there?" that's when I knew he saw something too, my dad goes, yeah is there a flag I saw something. I said "what did you guys see?" they both explained it to me the same hting at the same time, a white flowly piece of fabric and a wing.I think all three of us turned white, and what was even more crazy was that my husband is a HUGE skeptic and HE also saw it, and ADMITTED it!

I left dad with mom for a bit and pulled Bill out into the waiting room, he grabbed me and hugged me and said " You know I don't believe in that stuff but I know what I saw, and I know it was an angel and you dad saw it too" we went back into the room. And told my dad what we thought, and all three of us agreed that night that was what we saw, soon after seeing that, mom heart stopped. She was gone.....and believed we had witnessed her leaving us, we cried but we had an incredible sense of peace come over us, that she wasn't suffering and seeing that angel proved that to us.

We waited on the Chaplin to come in,and give her her final blessing,my husband mentioned the angel to her and she smiled and said "ahh that's common, it was your mothers angel coming to take her, cherish that, it is a wonderful thing what you saw"

The next day we planned moms funeral with the family, and then dad and I went back to his house because I wanted to look through mom jewelry box for her pearls to wear to the funeral,he told me I had inherited all of my mothers jewelry( which is an extensive collection) and any of her stuff was mine. I said I would just take the pearl for now and the rest of the stuff the next week.

As I was looking in the one box, my dad pointed to a smaller cherry wood box that held her expensive stuff "here there is more stuff in here" he said and began pulling open the drawers. in the very bottom drawer of the box, were two small letters, one for me and one for dad, my dad grabbed them and goes" omg Heather look she left us notes! She must have known!" we read them , then swapped them and read each others, dad said something told him to look in there. Mine said "Punky" (that was her nickname for me)"punky, I am so sorry that you have to read this now, please be strong and help your father through this, I just had to tell you how proud I am of you,you have turned into a wonderful young lady, wife and mother. You have given dad and I anything that we could ever want in a daughter.Please tell Hudson that his grandma loved him and how much joy he brought to my life.Be healthy and happy. Love Mom"

My dad and I cried for about an hour after that, but we felt HUGE relief, this was just yet another sign that pointed to the fact that she must have known.

The funeral was beautiful, all my family came in,tons of people, even a Senator my parents knew came in from D.C. for the night just to make it to say goodbye to my mom, it was a grand send off. At the funeral we told people of what we saw that night in the hospital room, my momther best freind said she saw the samething when her sister passed away, my friend John saw it when his daughter passed away. Knowing that confirmed to us that we really did see an angel. My dads sister Teresa also said something that gave me chills, she is dying of uterine cancer,the week before mom died, she went to temple (she is jewish) she is part of a club for terminally ill cancer patients, they did an exercise where they pulled a name out of a bowl and the name of that person was the person who was going to greet them in heaven, she pulled the name Judy, my moms name! She didnt put it togethor until she found out that mom had passed.

The burial the next day , followed by drinks and food at my aunts house was the hardest to handle for me,I was more concerned for my poor father, I am horribly worried for him.They were married for 36 years.

A few days later I took on the tough task of going through moms stuff, keeping what I wanted and donating what I didn't,I spent six hours, crying , going through stuff, remembering,it was healing for me.

Last Saturday Bill and I took Hudson over to my fathers for dinner, thought it would cheer him up, and it did, him and my mother had bought Hudson a rocking horse recently and my dad wanted him to have it before Christmas.I will have to post pics next time.

In celebration of moms life, I volunteered to have our big christmas eve dinner this year,Im cooking all the food mom used to make, and having everybody over, its what we all need, to be surrounded by family, especially my 90 year old grandmother.I don't plan on it being a sad occasion but a joyous one.Filled with lots of good food, watching Hudson open gifts, and quality time, the way mom would have wanted....Oh and of COURSE big glasses of Baileys Irish Cream LOL