My mother died suddenly at 69. Jenni and our family happened to be staying with my parents during a summer trip to Canada. We had returned to the house from a community pancake breakfast when Dad met us at the door in terrible distress."Brent! What am I going to do without her?"
I hugged him and it took a few seconds for me to realize what he was saying. When it hit home, the realization felt like being carried over a waterfall. I went to her room and saw the body that she had left during the night. She was gone.
During the next few days we prepared for a funeral and helped Dad settle her affairs. I picked up a pair of shoes she had worn just the day before she died. They looked so small. I sat on her deck with my brother Grant and reminisced about this remarkable woman who had grown up during the Great Depression on the harsh prairie of Alberta. As we talked, I began to sob. The groaning came unbidden and irrepressible.
Now my own dear Jenni lay near death. I understood how my father felt. The prospect of living without my life partner hit me in the gut and strangled my breath. My own feelings were irrelevant, though. Jenni was struggling to survive, and she needed my strength. I gathered what grit I had and went to the hospital.
She needed a transfusion to replace the water in her veins with blood. Her kidneys had failed, so dialysis was necessary. And doctors needed to flood her system with various medications. An IV in the arm would not do. She had to have a central venous catheter inserted in her chest.
I was allowed to watch as a surgeon did the insertion. He was alone in the room with Jenni and me, and though she was anesthetized and unconscious she moaned when he pushed the CVC into the vein.
Back in her hospital room, Jenni was tethered in so many different ways I didn't know how she would move, but move she did. The transfusions, dialysis, and IV saline solution got her kidneys going again and every hour or so she had to leave her bed and fight through the tubes and wires to get to the bathroom. One of our sensitive sons drew a little cartoon on the white board in her room depicting Jenni in her hospital gown straining against the tethers to get to the toilet, which was just out of her reach. All of our sons are talented cartoonists, so I don't know which one it was. It made her laugh, though, so it was much appreciated.
