Gone from my sight...

It is over.

I have not had time to process what I have seen and heard and experienced, but...I did not expect it to be like that. I don't know what I did expect.

Maybe I expected a Hollywood death where my mother would rasp her last words then look skyward to speak no more.

Maybe I expected a death like my grandmother's where my mother would pass silently in her sleep while no one was watching.

Maybe I expected it wouldn't happen at all, that she would miraculously awaken from her comatose state and suddenly recover as she has done so many other times.

I did not expect the wild sounds in her chest and the wide eyes as she struggled to breath. I did not expect the long bone shaking moans or the gurgling and the choking. I did not expect the convulsions in her abdomen or the stiffness in her arms.

The nurse came after my panicked call to the hospice 24-hour line. She looked over my mother calmly even as my mother's ragged breaths heaved and ebbed in tides of what looked, to me, like agony.

"This is normal," the young nurse nodded, "we see this a lot. I know it's probably not as peaceful as you thought it would be, but it's normal."

She went on to explain that my mother's lungs were failing. The noises came from fluid gathering in them. It is distressing to hear, she told me, but normal. We had done everything we could do. We had given her enough morphine, enough sedatives--she was as comfortable as any dying person could be, the nurse assured me.  That made me feel better about what was happening, but it didn't make it any easier to watch as my mother struggled to die.

I prayed. I begged.

Please don't let her keep on like this. Please let her go.

And the spirit of E.M. was there and the other spirits of her family were there--I could feel them. Then peace came over me--wings from the corners of my sight wrapped around me.

Stand at the end of the bed and let me borrow you. 

I had been reading the Raven Kaldera book again when my mother first started her convulsions, so I was in the frame of mind I needed to be in to listen to her speak, to follow her directions.

I did not lose consciousness, but I felt my body stand differently and something shifted in my eyes and hands. There was something other than me radiating from my form and I looked toward my mother and whispered almost silently--so quiet even the nurse who stood next to me didn't hear. I don't recall the words now, but they were words I had no business knowing. I felt my mother leave her body and in the same moment, mine went limber again and the feeling was gone.

The body continued to fight for breath, but the gasps became even and mechanical. Four gasps. Pause. Four gasps. Pause. Four gasps...

"It's just her body now," my father told me as I sat next to him--my father, the man who doesn't believe in spirits, "it's just her body going through the motions."

And so it was. It took a few hours for the last breath to come and when it did, it was a quiet whoosh and then nothing. It was peaceful at the end. The room was empty of both the living and of spirits when I said a quiet goodbye as we waited for them to come and take her body. After she was gone I went to my room and picked up my prayer book. I flipped to the section on Nebt-het and read the prayer aloud. I felt wings again briefly, and then I slept.