I was half way through a nights sleep, when I was awakened by someone throwing snow on my bedroom window. At first I thought they were trying to reach my neighbor above me, because that has happened before. But when they once again hit my window, I went to my kitchen window to have a look at who it was. And to my surprise it was my brother in law. My first thought was that he maybe needed a ride home after a night out. Because this was on a Saturday, on the 16 of december 2023 to be precise. When a lot of people have christmas parties. But when I opened the window and said hello with a smile, he didn´t smile back. ”I have some very bad news”, he said and swallowed. -Eh..Kari..mom…your mother has died!”.

In seconds I felt like throwing up and my body started to shake and shiver, like I had just jumped out of a plane and the adrenaline and fear was ravaging my body.

He told me that the family had gathered at his and my sisters flat, and he asked if I wanted to ride with him. But I took some deep deeeep breaths and said that I wanted to take my own car, not knowing if I was in shape to drive. But I washed my face, brushed my teeth, took two ginger pills against the nausea and a pill for the shaking and anxiety. The drive seemed very far, eventhough it takes about five minutes.

As soon as she opened the door, my sister hugged me tightly. We didn´t cry, because we were still in shock. Even my father bravely smiled at me when he saw me. He was sitting on the sofa having a smoke and a drink. He then started telling me what had happened.

The night before when he and mother had gone to bed, she started having pain in her shoulders and feeling nauseous. My father suggested they could go into the living room. And it was a little after they had sat down that he noticed that she sort of faded away and became unresponsive. He called 113, and while he waited for them he tried to wake her up by doing CPR.

It only took five minutes until the ambulance arrived. They worked on her for a little over an hour, but she was too far gone, and she was pronounced dead. The combination of nausea and shoulder pain were the typical signs of a heart attack in women. And she unfortunately had a powerful one. My father tried calling me and my sister, but we both had put our phones on silent or plane mode. Which says something about how unexpected this was. So my poor father couldn’t get through to us. But the ambulance people laid my mothers body on the bed and then drove my father up to my sister and woke her up. And it was a little while after that, that my brother in law came to me and delivered the sad news.

I stayed with my family and they told me that I would be able to see my mother’s body before the undertakers came. I felt a bit uneasy about that. I had many times wondered what it was like to see a dead person. And especially how hard it would be to see the body of one of my parents. I knew the day would come eventually, but you can never really prepare. The other thing we weren’t prepared for was that everyone had been infected with the coronavirus somehow. My father and my sister and her family all had been sick with Covid before. But I hadn’t. So I got the most sick. My throat hurt so much that I couldn’t swallow anything without extreme pain. And I had a fever. That’s when I was informed that my mother’s funeral was going to be just days before Christmas Eve. I wanted to be there with my father and my sister, but I was so sick and weak. I had not eaten and barely drunk anything in days by then. I was dehydrated. So I was forced to stay in bed. I was told that there were a lot of people who had come to the funeral. And my father had stood up after the ceremony and told them all why I couldn’t come to my own mother’s funeral. I love him for that.

A couple of years before her death, when she was undergoing chemotherapy, me and her had a talk about what her wishes were in case she would die from cancer. And she was firm on that she wanted to be cremated. So I informed my family of that the day of her death. I did record that conversation, but deleted it after she was cleared of cancer.

On Christmas Eve I felt good enough to be there with my family. And it was when I saw them again that I cried. Because I went directly from the shock of my mother passing to being very sick and missing her funeral. I hadn’t seen them at all after the 16th. It felt like an eternity, like I had lost everyone that day. So I was both relieved and sad at the same time. But some time after christmas I got to put my mother’s urn in the ground together with my sister. And our closest relatives were there with us. Since then I have visited my father every day for dinner. And since he is 90 years old, I’ve taken care of the garden and helped him with other daily chores. As my mother asked me to do. There are moments every day where we think of her and our hearts hurt for a moment. But I feel we have managed well considering our loss.

I love you mommy! See ya later!