Ciao mom!

It’s 3.57 in the morning, Saturday, August 19th. I don’t feel like sleeping much (for obvious reasons). I’m in the splendid little town of Udine. On Aug. 7th, the day after Madonna’s concert in Rome, I came up to Udine to see how my mother was. Udine had been hit by an incredible heat wave (on July 21st it was 39 degrees Celcius). My father would pass me the phone talk to my mother. We didn’t chat about Lebanon or things like that because for the last 3 or 4 years she was in the phase of senile dementia and/or Alzheimer’s disease. At one pt though, her voice sounded like it came from the grave. I asked my dad what was wrong. He said she was tired. I thought that it was more than just being tired. Dani and I were to have gone on the 20th to Greece on vacation. I thought that it would be a good idea to come up first to check things out. Glad I did. She was in pitiful condition. Thanks to a cousin doctor of mine, we rushed her to the emergency ward. From there, she was transferred to another ward.
My father in the meantime was hit my a severe case of sciatica. This impeded him from being able to go to the hospital to see my mother, which I gladly did twice per day. She basically lost between 6 to 7 litres of water, or 6-7 kilos of water. Her sodium level was at around 176 when for anyone normal it’s around 145. Instead of blood in her veins she basically had molasses. The dehydration was quite a lot for someone who had turned 80 in July (three yrs ago 15,000 elderly people died in France due to the massive heat wave that hit Europe). On Friday he finally managed, with great difficulty, to come to the hospital to see his wife. My mother was on intravenous, as well as being fed that way (she had gotten too weak to be fed via the mouth). She wasn’t doing that well. I had decided Friday nite, alone (Dani was taking care of her step-mother near Rome) to go catch an outdoor movie, just to wind down a bit. As I watching a Korean thriller, I kept on looking at the stars above, thinking for some strange reason that my mother wouldn’t come out of this all that well. I came home, spoke with Dani on the phone, and was reading when around midnight the phone rang. At first, I thought it was Dani. Instead, it was the hospital, advising me that the situation had gotten worse. I rushed out, again alone at 1 am in the morning, to find my mother on oxygen and with a fever of 38.2. The doctor, an Argentine immigrant with whom I got to speak Spanish with, told me that the situation had plummeted substantially. I was holding her hand, also whispering in her ear that “Com’on mom, you’ve survived the bombings over Udine 60 yrs ago not to mention German occupation and two (yes two) tumours (colon and breast), you’re not going to let a little water kill you”! At 1.41 am, with the doctor and three very professional nurses by her side, my mother left us. I don’t know exactly how to describe being physically next to someone as they (literally) breathe their last breath. It comes at greater and greater intervals. The doctor at one pt removed the oxygen, knowing I guess very well that there was little that could be done for her. One nurse said that she reacted in some way when I showed up. I guess she was happy that her "Marietto" (as I had been called for many yrs) was there for her. It was the least I could do after 12 days of going back and forth to feed her and to check up on her. I was glad that the day before my dad had managed—after 50 yrs of marriage—to have seen her and kissed her. While driving back to the hospital with the clothes necessary for her funeral, I thought how odd and ironic life really can be: she had been there 47 yrs ago when she brought me into this world and I, 47 yrs later, was with her when she left this world.
She had been an oustanding mother and wife (me with my mother in slightly better times).
Ciao mom,
Mario