Through my Mother’s Eyes

The gift my mother left for me

Personal Essay & Courtesy Photo by RAELYNN SHERIDAN

Through my mother’s eyes, I have seen a beautiful and chaotic world.

I see my family and friends. I have been lucky enough to see some of the world.

But through these eyes that my mother gave to me, I no longer see her.

My mother was a tiny, fierce and an unimaginably loving person. She stood at 4 feet 11 inches, with big brown round eyes and fluffy brown hair. She wore mom jeans and white Reeboks every day.

On her hip lay a machine that pumped medicine through a tube and into a hole, about the size of a marker, into her heart. The machine’s name was Fernando, or so my sister and I called it. Fernando didn’t always work well, and he made mom mix medical concoctions three times a day, every day, for 30 minutes at a time. Fernando didn’t let her swim, work, exercise, travel to far-away places, or live like a normal person. His accessories took up a giant cabinet in the bathroom and half the freezer. Sometimes I laid in bed at night thinking, “What if there is a fire, how will I be able to rescue all of Fernando’s equipment so my mom can live another day?”

My mother had Familial Pulmonary Hypertension; a rare disease of the heart and lungs that is genetically passed through generations. The Pulmonary Hypertension Association estimates that only a few hundred families in America carry the special gene mutation that causes this incurable disease. And of those families that carry the gene, only about 20 percent of people in the bloodline will get Familial Pulmonary Hypertension. She was diagnosed when I was 7 years old, my sister was about 13 or 14.

It was a gray day in late fall, my parents sat us down at the kitchen table around 4 p.m. and crossed their hands. I knew something was wrong because of their hands. The emotional walls I have put up to protect myself all my life were constructed at that moment. I don’t remember any of the conversation. I just know they told me and my sister Mom had an incurable disease and would be getting surgery in the next few weeks. “She isn’t going to die,” Dad said.

My walls didn’t allow me to hear the rest of that sentence though, “She isn’t going to die, at least not for a few years.”

Through my mother’s eyes, my childhood was full. Despite being terminally ill, she chaperoned field trips, volunteered in classrooms, went to the mall, drove an hour to dance lessons, horseback riding and math tutoring. We took family vacations and everything seemed normal most of the time. Things that freaked other kids out when they came to visit (medicine lying on the table and the occasional oxygen machine in the corner) never bothered us too much because that was Mom, and Mom made it OK. She was as tough as they come. She didn’t put up with any bullshit and was a force to be reckoned with. Despite her rock-solid façade, she wasn’t just my mom, but everyone’s. If she wasn’t your second mom, she was your best friend.

She made dinner every night and grew a flower garden on the deck. She played a mix of U2, James Blunt, Enrique Iglesias and whatever strange music my sister and I were into at the time as she shuttled us around.

She stopped at McDonald’s every morning for a soda; because we all know it tastes better from the machine.

She knew exactly who she was.

But my mom, as tough as she was, could not escape the short amount of time she had left.

She went to the hospital on a Thursday.

Hospital stays were fairly routine for us, so I passed up a phone call with her around 7 p.m.

I was just a child.

A child who sensed something bad was going to happen.

But a child that could not bear to let that sense emerge as a formed thought.

At 10 p.m. she had a heart attack.

Then another.

Then came life support.

Floods of people came from all over the country to say goodbye one last time.

The hospital had to devote a waiting room just for the people who loved her and came at a moment’s notice.

For two days, my walls crumbled. So did my mother.

Through my mother’s eyes I saw for the first time everything that she was and everything she had given me.

As my sister and I lay on either side of her hospital bed, my dad and grandparents standing nearby, my mother squeezed our hands one last time and the machine was unplugged.

Through my mother’s eyes — I cried.