"The End is Near"

My mom seems to be preparing for death. And it's freaking me out. Is it really that time yet? She's not in hospice care/palliative care yet. She's still in treatment! Currently taking 3 chemo drugs. Why is she doing this?

Maybe she knows that none of the chemo drugs are going to save her. Maybe she knows that the drugs may give her a few extra months, maybe just weeks. But as she told me the other day, "The end is near."

How near? I'm not sure. And I don't know if she knows how near it is either.

She's decided that she wants to plan her Memorial Service, or as she calls it, her "After Party."

She said, "My After Party. You know, after I'm dead and gone." Not exactly what you want to hear form your own mother.

She's come up with a plan on how to raise money for her After Party. There are two glass vases in my mom's room that she has named The Money Jars. Her rules are that if you cry in front of her, you have to put $1 in the Money Jar. And if you make her laugh (not an easy task because laughing takes so much energy for her), you have to put $5 in the other Money Jar.

The Money Jars

She's asked me to make sure that her After Party goes exactly how she wants it to go. She told me that she's worried that since she won't be around to make sure everything goes how she wants it, that no one's going to do it the way she wants. I reassured her that whatever she wants, she make it happen.

I asked her to write me a list of what she wants at her After Party. That was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to watch. It was a few hours after we had this talk and she was doodling in her sketchbook when she suddenly turned to a new page and started writing. That was too unusual. The part that caught my attention was that she was writing in English, not Farsi. Probably because she wanted me to be able to read it.

Unfortunately, her handwriting has become to tiny that I couldn't read what she was writing about. So I asked her to read it outloud to me.

"It says Step one: Guests arrive. Step Two: Someone reads my eulogy...."

At that point, I realized what she was doing. It was so heart-breaking. It was even more heart-breaking at this point because I realized that she had started writing her own eulogy! But even on top of that, her voice trailed off because she herself couldn't even read her own handwiriting. She couldn't read what she had just written seconds before!

It scared me so much. I'm so scared.

But my mom doesn't seem to be scared at all. She seems ready.

But I don't want her to be ready! I want her here!