Stomaching It
By Lauren Kaufmann
Photo by Marcelo Leal
To explain my time leading up to my mother's death is to vomit my stomach, my lungs, my liver, my intestines, my heart, out of my mouth onto the floor in front of me. It is to rip open my wrists and let you watch the blood spurt out like a hose with a cut in it. Because grief is really that visceral. Grief sits in your stomach, pressing on your ribcage from the inside, rolls around the back of your throat, swims around in the tiny space under your tongue.
I do not know how to tell this story to you poetically or elegantly, because this visual is neither of those things. A lot of times when people talk about death they use flowery language to soften the blow of the scene. But how can I soften the image of watching the woman who birthed you dry heave into an emesis bag because there has not been anything in her stomach for two weeks? Her body that produced me and my siblings can barely even produce saliva. There was not even spit left of her at this point in time, I cannot put that pleasantly.
Especially because I was under the impression she was supposed to get better. My father, due to no fault of his own, was not giving me the full picture of her illness. Even when she got sepsis he expected her to recover relatively soon. When I got home and saw her body, I realized the extent to which he was in denial.
Her yellow, jaundiced, skin hung on her bones. Let me be clear in saying that- it was hanging off of her skeleton. Her face looked like it was made of an olive toned chiffon fabric draped over her cheek bones and brow. Her veins visibly crawled under her skin, holding blood in but only barely. Her hairline had crept back, even though she wasn’t on the kind of chemo that makes you lose your hair.
I knew that her body had already surrendered. She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t adjust her body on the couch or eventually the hospice house’s bed. The time she spent there was time waiting for the cancer to take control of what it had been chipping away at for months now. It was time spent in death’s waiting room, patiently, eagerly, peacefully. Her body was hardly hers to move anymore, there was little to hold on to. She would miss us, of course, but she said she would still take care of us in Heaven. I believed her in that moment, and I believe she makes good on that word daily.
About the Author
Lauren Kaufmann is a graduating fourth year at Northeastern University, where she has studied psychology and criminal justice.