An Intrusion on New Year’s Eve

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She was asleep on her favourite armchair, her head leaning to one side, eyes closed. It was the night of the 30th of December 2017 and Donald Trump was speaking in low tones on the screen. She loved watching him. She slept soundly, sure that she had locked all the doors. Unknown to her however, an intruder had managed to gain entry into the house.

The intrusion was silent. Her son, who was sound asleep in his bedroom didn’t hear it. To date, he doesn’t know how long it was there and at what time it attacked. But as silently as it came in, it left and life as he knew it, was never the same again.

At five am he woke up. Not for any reason. He said “something” woke him up. When he got out of his room, the lights were still on. Strange, he thought. He heard the sound of the TV in the other room and figured his mum must have fallen asleep on the couch — again.

“Mom,” he said as he walked to switch off the TV. No response. He turned to face her and repeated himself only louder. “Mum.” She didn’t budge. He went to her and shook her by the shoulder but her body just slumped heavily over the cushions, her lips parted, her eyes closed. Instinctively, he knew something was wrong. He dialled his older brother — a doctor.

His brother *Alpha, took a while to answer his phone. When he did, it took equally long to get his attention.

“Alpha.”

“Mmm.”

“Alpha,” he said impatiently. “You need to come home.”

“Mmmmh, why?”

“Alpha. Please wake up.”

“Dude. Why are you calling me at…5 am?”

“I think something has happened to mum. She is unconscious.”

Alpha hung up and jumped out of bed. He remembers grabbing his keys as he ran out in his shorts, a t-shirt and bathroom slippers. He didn’t call back or call anyone else. He wanted to focus on what to do when he got there — all the while praying his brother was terribly mistaken. As far as he knew his mum was not ill. Nor did she suffer from any known chronic illness. Why would she suddenly be unconscious?

He got there in a matter of minutes and ran up the stairs two at a time. He found his brother waiting by the door. He walked past him into the TV room and pulled away the blanket that still covered her. “Mummy,” he shook her. On realising she was unresponsive, he began to follow the critical steps to assess for her level of consciousness. He first checked her radial pulse and as he did he could hear his own pulse in his ears. The room was deathly quiet. He pressed softly at first, then hard in case it was in there somewhere — nothing. He then checked the brachial pulse at the elbow area — nothing. And finally the carotid pulse at the neck. That was usually the clincher. Nothing. “Was she in a coma?”he wondered in disbelief. He asked his brother to get him a torch and used it to check her eyes. It felt like looking into an endless dark hole. Her eyelids felt sluggish and her pupils were not reacting to light.

His brother stood by him like a siamese twin — heaving anxiously following his every move. He sent him to get some cotton wool to give him time to process what was going on. He was back before he could finish a thought. He wet it with cold water and used it to rub the inside of her eye. This was the last test — the corneal reflex. A test done to ascertain death. He held his breath, willing her to blink. Nothing. He tried the other eye. No response.

He became unglued. In usual practice this is the point you walk to the family and tell them ‘we did all we could.’ But this wasn’t usual practice. It wasn’t a drill. This wasn’t his patient. It was his mother. He became riveted to the ground unable to turn to face his brother. His feet were lead. His neck stiff. His brother broke through his reverie, “Is Mom ok?”

He took in a long, slow breath hoping to exhale his dread with the air in his lungs. “She is dead.” He said more to himself. His words felt thin and empty; even as he said them. There must have been a better way to say it. Surely all those lessons on breaking bad news had to count for something. But he was paralysed and no matter how hard he tried, he had nothing more to say. It’s like there were no words to describe what was going on at that moment. So he just stood there.

He went back to their last conversation that evening when she had called him. “Alpha, my right arm has a tingling sensation.”

He was out cycling with friends in Karura Forest enjoying the wind whispering in his ear as he cycled away. He took a break and asked her a series of questions to try to ascertain where the numbness could be coming from but her response was negative to any other symptoms. He asked to go for her and take her to the ER for a check up but she declined. She wanted a prescription. A quick remedy. He was reluctant and they had a brief back and forth about it. But when your mother says no — its a no; so he obliged and sent her a prescription for some meds on condition that they would go the following day. Little did he know, that the intruder was hanging loosely by and she would be gone by then.

He was whisked back to the present, by his brother who was bent over, emitting long, scalding sobs. The kind that come again and again reinforcing each other and threatening not to end. At the sight of him, he too broke down unable to comprehend what had just happened. Did he just declare his mom dead? Is that what all his medical training culminated to?

The following activities were a blur. The hours seemed to move with deliberate lethargy. Inform the police, write a statement, call the coroner, carry her lifeless body from the house to the hearse as the neighbours watched in silent horror. All the while in between sobs and stretches of silence. Alpha knew he needed to inform their other siblings but he did not have the gall for it yet. Not after he had seen what this had done to his younger brother. They would want to know what happened and he didn’t even know what to say.

How does a perfectly healthy 67 year old just keel over and die? Yet she embodied the picture of good health. And what a time to exit; this was the worst possible way to start a new year. He wondered whether he would be able to ever celebrate a New Year again — plagued by the memory of their mum.

A mother is your pillar. A locomotive that pulls all the cars that follow. Without her your world explodes into pieces that you feel you can never put back together. His mother was the only parent they had left — after their dad had succumbed five years earlier. To think that he wouldn’t talk to her, hear her high pitched voice or taste her cooking again broke him. He couldn’t sleep for weeks after that night. Sometimes he would wake up in a sweat wondering whether he had made a mistake by declaring her dead — yet maybe she was alive. He would dream of himself check her over and over hoping for a different result; but the ending was always the same. He became haunted by that night. By the intruder that came and left unnoticed.

Days later, they were at the funeral home waiting for the autopsy report. The government pathologist walked out, several sheets of paper in hand. They all held their breath as he once again asked them to identify themselves. “Only immediate family,” he insisted. He was direct and without missing a beat he said, “It was discovered that she died of a pulmonary embolism. A clot that was in her left leg, broke into several small clots that migrated and blocked all the blood vessels in her lungs. There was no suffering. No struggle,” he said. And no one could have known.”

He was not relieved.

Because of the circumstances surrounding her death, the suddeness of it and their reaction to it, a friend referred them for grief counselling. So together they had a six hour session with a grief counsellor who took them through the cycle of bereavement and loss and the things that can complicate grief or make it easier to withstand.

“Do you still have the nightmares? Does it get better?” I asked him.

“Grief is like a long night. But you have to remember, without the dark, you can’t see the stars. It gets better.”

Grief counseling is a form of therapy that aims to help people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive responses to loss.

These experiences are commonly thought to be brought on by a loved person’s death or any other form of devastating loss e.g. divorce or loss of a job etc.

Everyone experiences and expresses grief in personally unique ways that are shaped by family background, culture, life experiences, personal values, and intrinsic beliefs.

It is not uncommon for a person to withdraw from their friends and family and feel helpless; some might be angry, some may laugh while others experience strong feelings of regret or guilt. Tears or the lack of crying can both be seen as appropriate expressions of grief.

Grief can also be a catalyst for depressive illness which manifests as lack of sleep, loss of interest in things one previously liked, loss of appetite etc.

Counseling provides an avenue for healthy resolution for grief.