Once again, it’s been way too long since my last post and I apologize. I made my site private believing I had no more to say. Much can change in a year.

My previous post was written March 21, 2025 when I said Steve and I needed to go to the US. Both our mothers were 96. Three months to the day after I wrote that my mother passed away and 4 days later Steve’s mother passed away. Neither of us had gone been back to see them since July 2024.

On June 11th my mother messaged me that her granddaughter E and her husband got home from their cruise and E was sick. She sounded awful. E said she felt like the other times she had Covid. She and her husband picked up their dog from my mother’s house by meeting my brother in the garage so that my 96 year old mother wouldn’t catch anything. Mom was finally feeling good after months of UTI’s that had not responded to antibiotics until her urologist prescribed one that she had to take for a full month and the doctor said was the last resort. Things were looking up and she wanted to come to Mazatlan.

When someone has Covid they are supposedly infectious for 8-10 days afterwards. Four days later on June 14th, E and her husband visited my mother. E is a PHD in the medical profession. June 17th my mother felt terrible and both her arms kept going numb. A niece took her to the ER where she sat waiting for five hours to be seen. She tested positive for Covid (after not having left her house in 12 days) and her troponin level was elevated indicating she might be going to have a heart attack. My mother was admitted to a room in isolation. We believe she was delirious for two days because she was telling all kinds of wild stories about the nurses. Although she was 96, she was still very sharp with a good memory. A cardiologist checked her out and said her heart was getting good blood flow. She was released from the hospital June 19th in the afternoon.

Once home, she felt good other than the numbness in both arms and she kept having woozy spells. My brother was checking her blood pressure and oxygen and they were fluctuating. I talked to her for over an hour the night of the 19th and she was cheerful.

June 20th my brother said she was on the phone for hours excitedly telling her friends about her hospital stay. And she was in and out of the kitchen cooking. She messaged me about 7:30 in the evening that she just noticed her drivers license had expired on her birthday in March. We were chatting about that and her messaging abruptly stopped without the usual goodnight. My brother called about 45 minutes later that she was sitting in her chair and quietly went unconscious. He called an ambulance. She had earlier told him her bra and blouse was too tight and he got her a different top which she put on while he was in the garage.

My brother called my niece E who called her sister L and told her what happened and to go to the hospital. I called L and she said the doctor told her my mother wasn’t going to make it. Hearing that was so unexpected. When you have had a parent for your entire life who just always bounces back and even though she was 96, it never ever occurred to me she would ever leave us. There was a mixup at the hospital as she had a DNR (do not resuscitate) on file and she had been resuscitated before L arrived and my mother awoke with extreme neck pain. She was given morphine which didn’t help the pain. By then all four granddaughters were at her bedside. When my mother say the four grand daughters, her last words were she hoped the four would get together. She was then given fentanyl for the pain and peacefully left us a few hours later after midnight. She didn’t have a classic blood clot inducing heart attack. The Covid caused a condition called dysautonomia, where her body couldn’t maintain vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.

I immediately made a plane reservation to fly alone to Colorado the next day. I didn’t sleep in the few hours that were left in the night and was in too bad a shape emotionally and cancelled the reservation. I asked Steve to please go with me and he agreed. Then I couldn’t get reservations until 3 days later. It was just as well because we had to take our dog Mitzi to the vet for a health certificate.

A friend was taking us to the airport at 9 am. At 7:30, Steve’s phone rang. Oh-oh. HIS mother had just died. She was also 96. She had been in hospice and was comatose so it was expected but still heartbreaking. So poor Steve had to travel that day with his emotions more raw than mine. There were flight delays on top of storms, a diversion to Austin, the entire plane’s luggage was lost somewhere in the Dallas airport so we couldn’t go through customs for hours, we missed our connection, was rebooked on a later one, and missed that one. We finally arrived at my mother’s house about 2 am.

So many people told me she lived a good life and she WAS 96. I’m still in the mindset of it was too soon and it didn’t have to be. Her grandmother lived to be 100 without ever seeing a doctor and I just assumed my mother would too. And now there are all of these regrets. She missed her home country of Austria so much. She never asked me to take her there but now I realize she rarely made direct requests and I should have known.

My mother had named me executor to settle her affairs and more headache and heartache was yet to come.