Rose Colored Glasses

In 1987, my mom was told she had a year to live.

She had lung cancer that had spread to her brain. I was twenty-three years old, living four hours away. No training in death, no roadmap for grief, no idea how to hold space for someone staring down the end of their life.

There was distance between us, not just in miles or years, but in the kind of closeness I quietly wished I could have had with my mom.

I remember sitting by her bedside, trying to wrap my head around what she was saying. A year to live. One year. That’s what they gave her. And in my innocence, or maybe my hopefulness, I said, “Then we should do something with that year. We should go somewhere, do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Make it matter.”

It made sense to me then, that we could turn that time into something beautiful. That we could squeeze joy from heartbreak.

She looked at me, and I’ll never forget the way her eyes settled on mine. “Gabby,” she said, “you’ve always seen life through rose-colored glasses.” Her voice wasn’t cruel, just tired. Honest. She explained that I had no idea what she was going through. That she was dying, really dying, and I needed to understand that. I never understood that. None if it made sense to me.

She died exactly one year later. She was 51. I’ve now lived ten years longer than she ever got the chance to.

I carried that conversation with me for decades. The memory of her words, the way she dismissed mine, and it has haunted me. I thought I’d failed her. That I’d said the wrong thing.

But now, thirty-seven years later, I sit at the bedsides of the dying every day. I am a hospice nurse and an end-of-life doula. I’ve walked with over 2,500 people to the edge of this life. I’ve listened to their stories. I’ve held their hands as they let go. And if I could go back and sit with my mom again, knowing what I know now, I would say the exact same thing.

I would still say, “let’s make this time matter.”

No matter how heavy the diagnosis, no matter how long or short the time, we still get to choose what to do with the days we have left. We still get to love, to speak, to laugh, to cry, and to say goodbye in a way that matters. To say what we need to say. And if we are lucky, we get the chance to say we are sorry, to forgive, to make amends, and to find some kind of peace with all of it; the past, the present, and whatever comes after.

Death doesn’t wait for us to be ready. But life... life will wait for us to choose it, right until the end. So maybe I did see through rose-colored glasses, and maybe that’s not such a bad way to see someone you love, or the time they have left.

xo

Gabby