Chapter Thirty-One
I’ll spare you the gritty details of what comes next. Death, even surrounded by family, even with prayer and morphine working in tandem, is hard. There’s no do-overs, there’s no rehearsals.
Tyler arrives in more than enough time to have a moment with Mom. He does a better job of leading us through prayers than I did, and I gratefully relinquish the role to him, so relieved to have at least one thing off my shoulders.
At one point, Zenny whispers to me that this is like birth in a way, and she shows us Bell men how to lovingly doula Carolyn Bell through a different kind of labor. We rub her hands and feet, we stroke her hair. We pray and talk constantly, even when her eyes start drifting closed and her breathing shudders into a series of jagged moans and gasps. W
