Chapter 26: The Final Months
It has been two days since my mom took her life.
Right now, I am worried about my dad.
He blames himself.
I don’t know what I can say that will convince him not to.
I know he is searching for an explanation, just as I am.
We both want somewhere to put the anger.
The scammers are an obvious target.
My mom had received another message from someone pretending to be someone else on the morning of her
death.
By then, she had changed her phone number, email addresses, and social media accounts in an effort to
escape the people who continued contacting her.
She had also stayed away from social media after I asked her to.
And still, the messages found their way back to her.
I don’t know what that final message meant to her.
I don’t know what role, if any, it played in what happened later that day.
I only know that it was one more intrusion into a life that had already been consumed by them for far too
long.
My mom had become incredibly isolated.
Many of the people who had once been part of her life were no longer around by the end.
I was angry about that at the time.
I felt as though people she believed would always be there had disappeared when being her friend became
difficult.
I cannot know everything that happened within those relationships or why individual people stepped away.
I only know how small her world seemed to become.
In the end, the people I saw consistently around her were my dad, my wife, my children, and me.
We tried to be there for her.
But we could not give her whatever it was she needed to survive this.
The previous seven months have begun to blur together.
There were fewer dramatic events than during the months I wrote about earlier, but that did not mean things
were better.
My mom was deeply depressed.
There were several visits to mental-health facilities, but from my perspective, very little seemed to change
afterward.
During what became her final stay in mental-health care, I received a call from a doctor with Veterans Affairs.
The call took place on October 5.
For roughly twenty minutes, I told him everything I could think of.
I told him about the changes I had watched in my mom.
The eating problems.
The scammers.
Her depression.
The changes in her behavior and when I believed they had begun.
I was desperate for someone with more knowledge and authority than I had to understand the seriousness of
what I had been watching.
I wanted someone to intervene.
My mom was discharged the following day.
One week later, she was dead.
As I write this, I am furious.
I cannot understand how I could tell someone everything I knew and then watch my mom come home the
next day.
I feel failed by a system I had repeatedly turned to because I did not know where else to go.
I wanted the professionals to do something that I could not.
I wanted them to save my mom.
I don’t know what her doctors knew that I didn’t.
I don’t know what she told them.
I don’t know what their evaluation showed or what options were legally or medically available to them.
I only know what happened from where I stood:
I begged for help.
She came home.
A week later, she was gone.
I am angry.
I don’t know what to do with that anger yet.
There were still good days during those final months.
Sometimes I caught glimpses of the mom I remembered.
She was still fighting through whatever was happening inside her.
Now I carry the regrets that so often seem to follow loss.
I wish I had done more.
I wish I had talked with her more.
Toward the end, I had begun distancing myself because so many of our conversations felt the same.
I often felt as though she was telling me whatever she thought would keep me from worrying.
At the time, that made it difficult for me to trust what she said.
Now I wonder whether she was simply giving us whatever pieces of herself she still could.
I don’t know.
I want to believe that the additional months gave her more time with us.
More time with my dad.
More time with me.
More time with her grandchildren.
In the immediate aftermath of her death, I found myself wondering whether she had been planning to take
her life long before that Sunday.
I replayed conversations.
I replayed her behavior.
I searched backward for signs that suddenly seemed obvious because I knew how the story ended.
I told myself that I should have seen it coming.
Maybe part of me had.
Maybe I was simply trying to make sense of something that did not make sense.
I will never know exactly what was happening inside my mom during those final months.
I wish I did.