Even at the end, Mom found way to connect

My mother died unexpectedly last month. And just as unexpectedly, she left a lesson and a final grace note.

Mom was diagnosed with congestive heart disease a few months ago, which brought us all up a little bit short. She didn’t need surgery, which was just as well — it frightened her, I think, because she had watched my father go through that ordeal several years earlier.

Over the past few months mom had been rebounding nicely.

Her doctors felt good enough about her condition that at the end of May they said there was no reason to see her again until fall.

But her heart had other plans. Mom died without warning, apparently late at night and without much drama.

Tragically, we didn’t find out until at least a day, and maybe two, later.

A parent’s death hotwires one’s own sense of mortality and creates a vacuum. Not knowing how she spent her final hours added to the grief an element of uncertainty that unsettled our family.

“It looks like she died sometime Wednesday,” I told my brothers and sisters, most of whom live elsewhere.

Mom had called me at mid-day. She’d been ill the night before, but was feeling better. Probably just worn out from a recent trip, she said. Later, she called a friend and left a voice message.

I got a busy signal when I called that evening, a sure sign she was online.

Mom resisted computers until, finally, her brother Bernie taught her the miracle of e-mail. She suffered a few missteps and false starts (to learn patience, teach a parent to use a computer), but soon she was off to the races.

Mom went online every night to check the news from a pair of old hometowns. E-mail connected her with people physically distant but close to her heart.

I called her again on Thursday but got a busy signal, which normally would mean the batteries in her phone or her hearing aids had failed.

Unfortunately, this time, it meant the unimaginable had happened.

My siblings and I were heartsick to realize we hadn’t been able to say goodbye, and felt even worse that no one had been with her when she died.

“It’s best this way,” we told each other. “She never wanted to be a burden on anyone.”

But beneath the bravado we wanted a better sense of the circumstances of her death.

It was a complete surprise, then, to learn that hours after talking to anyone, she had sent a message to Bernie in California.

She was tired, she wrote, and was looking forward to turning in: “Bedtime again — thank goodness — it’s been kinda’ struggle to stay out of bed today but I made it until now at 9:15 so it’s now off to bed!”

A short time later, she sent off another message, this to her sister-in-law in Southern Utah, down in the red-rock landscape she so loved.

“Gosh,” she said, in response to news of old acquaintances, “so many of our age group are either sick or gone to the other side.”

Neither message tells us much about how mom died — although both contain more than a whisper of foreboding — but they have given us the reassurance that up until the end, she was cogent and in good spirits.

Even more important, in what appear to have been her last hours, she was thinking about and in touch with people she loved.

In his book “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” philosopher-cum-Web-savant David Weinberger said: “The Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are — and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world.”

Mom could have picked up a pen and a piece of paper that night and written notes to Bernie and Aunt Lena, but she was never much of a writer. And as for the phone — it’s not really an option when you’re on a fixed income and can’t hear half of what’s said anyway.

It turns out that this “world of pure connection” was an ideal place for mom. I don’t know if it helped her helped her understand what it is to be human, but I do know it made her life richer, and that’s a large-size blessing in its own right.