As her health got worse and worse, she began talking about her death. She made it plain that she was absolutly not to be kept alive on any type of machine. She ordered the forms to fill out for a "Living Will", and subtly made sure that we knew what she wanted. Looking back now, it's almost as if she already knew her own fate, maybe she did, there were all sorts of hints that were there, just none of us saw them until much later. She made sure that all, or at least almost all of the loose ends in her life were tied up before she left us.

Now for the hardest part, the day she left us. Before I go on, I just want to say that writing this all down has been very therapudic for me. Everything that I've written up until now has been just my randon thoughts and feelings about my mother and the relationship between us. I didn't really write it for the benefit of anyone else except for myself, and if you've read this far, then obviously, I haven't exactly bored you to tears.

But this next part is the most important part to me and is going to be the hardest to write for me. Some of the things, I've told others, some I haven't, and some of it is still actually hard for me to understand, but for some reason, I feel like I've got to get it all out of me and down somewhere other than just inside of my head, if for no other reason than to keep my own sanity. So here goes:

On August 31, 1994, around 3:45 in the afternoon, I had just laid down to rest for a few minutes to try and get rid of a headache. The phone rang and my daughter answered it. She came in my bedroom and said, "Mama, Pawpaw just called and said to come up there, he said he thinks Granny's dying.". Well, this really wasn't anything unusual for my dad, he had done this a number of times when my mom had over done things and had gotten out of breath, and before she could catch her breath enough to tell him she was alright, he had picked up the phone and called me. Usually by the time I got up there, she was fussing at him for calling me, and fussing at me for coming. But that time, I jumped up, threw on my shoes and ran out the door. When I got there, she was sitting in her chair, just like she always did when she would sit down to rest. She was still breathing heavily and she had her eyes closed and her head back like she had just sat there to catch her breath like I'd seen her do hundreds of times. My dad was standing over her with a newspaper fanning her. I tried to get her attention but couldn't. I knew that this time was different, so I picked up the phone and dialed 911 and got an ambulance on the way. In the meantime my husband had come up there and I made my dad stop fanning her and tell me what happened. He said that he had gone back to be bedroom to lay down for a minute while my mom was putting up the clothes that she had just washed. He said he heard her walk from the back bedroom to the den, breathing really hard and she said something about she had to sit down for a minute. A few seconds later he heard her say, "Honey! Honey!", and by the time he got to the den she was sitting there just as she was when I got there, and she wouldn't say anything, so he called me.

My husband came in and I got him to take my dad outside, because I was afraid something was going to happen to him if he stayed in there. I went back in the den and knelt down beside her chair and took her hand. I tried to get her to respond to me in any way, by opening her eyes, by squeezing my hand or anything, she couldn't. But just being there beside her, holding her hand, I had the most peaceful feeling. It's honestly too difficult to actually put into words. In my heart, I knew that I was losing my mother, but I wasn't sad, in fact just the opposite. I was happy. For her. I found myself talking to her, and I don't even know what all I said, just a few things, but it was almost like I could feel, not hear her answering me. I remember telling her that I loved her, and saying that I knew that she was where she wanted to be finally, she didn't have to worry about each and every breath now. I even felt a little jealous, I started talking to her like an old friend that I hadn't seen in a while, talking about how things were going to be so much better now for her. I have no idea where the thoughts or words were coming from.

About that time, my daughter came in, she had walked up from our house. She came in and I told her that it didn't look good, that I had called an ambulance and they were on their way. I felt like she needed a few minutes with her Granny, so I walked to the front door to wait for the ambulance. I was trying to sort my own thoughts out at the time. I couldn't understand why I wasn't sad, why wasn't I upset. I knew that I'd always been the type of person that could handle some type of emergency on the spur of the moment. I've always been the type that worked well under stress like this, but usually if I've got time to think about what's actually going on, I'm liable to fall apart. I was trying to figure out why, if I knew that my own mother was about to die, was I so calm.