It's my deceased mother's 50th birthday today. I think it's time I shared her story.

Apparently it’s a miracle that I’m alive, or so I’ve been told.

The person who carried me seemed to have barely been held together by extra-strength duct tape and staples; her flesh and bones like a shattered glass vase glued back together in a half-hearted attempt to fix her. Every time something broke, malfunctioned, or stopped working she was patched up as best as possible and sent on her way. But in the end, after 35 years she couldn’t be put back together again and broke for the last time.

Though I was created from a broken body, miraculously I was born premature but relatively unscathed. As a baby and a toddler, I was the epitome of perfect health. I wish I could say the same for my mother. Brought into the doctor by her mother’s intuition, Linda Diane Fralick was diagnosed with medullary cystic kidney disease. It was the most correct diagnosis they could give her, as the advancement of medicine had not yet caught up with her actual disease, Senior-Loken Syndrome, and knowledge about genetics and mutations was barely out of its infancy. When my mom was a young teenager, my grandma had a feeling that she needed to get my mom checked at a doctor. My mom refused for a while but my insistent grandmother ended up winning. Lo and behold, her kidney function had all but ceased. Her doctor received test results, and then ordered a complete re-testing because clearly there had been a lab error. My grandmother asked what had happened and the doctor stated that the results said her potassium level was 8, and that he had patients die with a potassium of 6, so how could she still be alive? They ran it again. It was correct.

Dialysis soon became a dreary but necessary part of life until a year later my mother’s older sister gave her a kidney. She spent 2 months in the hospital fighting rejection. The doctors let her go home for Christmas, but the day after had to go in and remove the kidney because it had started to liquefy. The doctors said if it had been removed any later it would have been like poison running through her veins, killing her.

Dialysis went on for four more years during high school. Finally a donor kidney was found, which lasted a year before she rejected it. She had to go to dialysis for another year and then received another kidney. She did very well with it and started on getting her LPN from Utah Valley State College.

Determination flowed freely through her unstoppably, whether in sickness or health. Even so, it came as a shock to her parents, doctors, and church leaders when she announced she was set on going on a mission. She said God had blessed her so much by giving her that kidney, so it was time for her to give something back to Him. She went on her way with unquenchable fire, eager to do her part. Sadly that wasn’t enough to keep her from rejecting the kidney and she had to get it removed and had her mission cut short. She would be on dialysis 3 times a week for seven years. Though she went through dialysis for a total of around 1,000 times she finished school and got her LPN. Life on a dialysis machine is not easy.

One morning around 5 am my mom’s younger sister ran upstairs to tell my grandma to call 911. They rushed down to her room and found her on the floor, not able to stand up or talk coherently at all. AT the hospital the doctor generously let my grandma sit by her side, holding her hand and comforting her while he was checking her out when he turned around to do something. Lying in the hospital bed, her heart was pounding in her chest and then suddenly stopped. My grandma calmly stood up, turned to the doctor, and told him she had stopped breathing. The doctor immediate called a code blue and my grandma was forced to leave when the code team showed up.

After a long time, the doctor came out to tell my grandma that she had a cardiac arrest and they had put her on a ventilator and were life-flighting her to the university hospital in Salt Lake City. She was on a ventilator for two days and in grave condition but started to improve and eventually went home. In those seven years of dialysis nothing continued to stop her and she got her RN.

At one point her father was fighting prostate cancer and a blood clot in his lungs while in Utah Valley Hospital in Provo and she had been admitted to the ICU of University hospital in Salt Lake. In complete and total despair my grandma cried out to God, pleading with Him that if he was going to take both her husband and her daughter, to take her daughter first because she couldn’t go through her daughter’s death alone without her husband. Her husband ended up dying, but God blessed her by allowing my mother to heal and she became a great strength and support to my grandmother during that time.

 

Two weeks after he died, the phone rang. It was my uncle, my mom’s older brother calling to tell my grandmother that my mom had gotten in a car accident on her way to dialysis. They rushed to the hospital and were in complete shock when they saw her and found out what had happened.

Every bone in her face had been fractured including her skull, her collarbone was broken and her ankle had been shattered. The next day, on her 35^th wedding anniversary, my grandma was told that a blood clot had been found on her brain from the skull fracture and that she would assuredly die without surgery but there was a high chance she would die during the surgery as well. She had the surgery and miraculously everything went perfectly. She looked pretty bad but was recovering well. 

Her current job was being a nurse at Wasatch Mental Health in Provo on the night shift. A few times she switched with whoever needed to and worked during the day shift. When my grandma visited her in the hospital my mom said, ‘Look at what I have” and handed her a small stuffed animal. She told how an orderly she’d seen a few times during the day shift had heard about her accident and came to visit her and gave her the stuffed animal. He visited with her until her dinner was brought and he left. He was headed towards the elevator when he realized she would probably need help opening her milk carton since she could only use on hand and went back to her room, opened her milk, and visited a little longer. One year later they were married on July 18^th, 1992 (he later told my grandma that when he first saw her working at the hospital, he thought she was the cutest nurse he had ever seen). She was 26.

They moved to an apartment in Orem, Utah. A little after their marriage, she had either her parathyroid gland or adrenal gland(s) removed (I can’t remember exactly which one it was, all I remember was the ‘gland’ part) and suffered from petit mal seizures for a while. Because of her special circumstances she was able to have my dad help her in taking one of her nursing exams (without him she probably couldn’t have passed). She had been told that she was too high-risk to ever receive another kidney transplant ever again and that she would be on dialysis for the rest of her life. Luckily that didn’t turn out to be true or I wouldn’t be here right now. One day she had called my grandma, elated, to announce that the University of Utah hospital had called and said they had a kidney that was such a perfect match that they couldn’t turn her down for it. After a total of 12 years on dialysis and three transplants, she had what turned out to be her 4^th and final kidney transplant.

As soon as she had the transplant, she asked her doctor if she could get pregnant, he said to her, “You stay out of the hospital and be healthy for one year and we’ll talk about it.”

One day approximately a year later she called my grandma telling her that she was pregnant. She had done a home test and had one at the hospital. She called her doctor’s office and told the nurse, who said in return, “Doctor Stephanz is going to have a fit when he finds out.” Luckily he turned out to be very supportive but also very concerned. 

They soon moved to Nampa, and though a high-risk pregnancy and preeclampsia usually is not a good combination, everything was just about perfect and I was born 1.5 months yearly. As a toddler we had all caught the norovirus, and she was in the hospital because of it, but was able to become well after a while. Eighteen months later my brother was born slightly smaller and had a longer NICU stay but all was well. She got a job working at the Boise Saint Alphonsus Behavioral Health Center as a psychiatric nurse in the inpatient area. It ended up being quite ironic that she was in that line of work and when I was in Intermountain those two times there were a few people working there who used to work with her, including the wife of one of my favorite teachers at my school who she used to carpool with every day. Whenever I see this teacher he always smiles and says that his wife wants to know how I’m doing and sometimes goes into a story about seeing me as a baby, and he always smiles when I tell him I want to be a nurse and says, “Just like your mother!” My counselor who I started seeing when I got out of Intermountain the second time found out that her boss used to be my own mother’s boss, and asked her for a few stories about her. My last appointment with her, she shared a few stories and said that her boss said she was always playing jokes on people at work all the time, and was always laughing or smiling. 

 The end was a surprise.

We weren’t expecting the end to come when it did, and how it did. She’d gone through dozens of surgeries, many life-threatening situations; she’d survived against the odds so many times. Her body had been put through hell and she had pulled through. It was expected she would die in the midst of a great battle between life and death, that in the midst of a great siege her body would eventually give up from the stress of some medical emergency. They never would have guessed that what would end up taking her life would be such a shockingly silent killer. Two and a half years later, minor problems showed up in a routine blood test, nothing too serious. Two days before Thanksgiving of 2000, she was admitted to the hospital just because her doctor wanted to see if he needed to adjust her meds.

The day before Thanksgiving, my dad spent the day with her and Kevin and I were with the grandparents. We visited with her and stayed until about 9:30-10:00, said our “I love you”s and “goodnight”s and hugged and kissed and went back to my grandparents’ house. At 4:15 am Thanksgiving morning, her nurse called.

At 3 am she was sleeping soundly and there was nothing to indicate anything was wrong. Twenty minutes later he went into her room again to check on her and she had stopped breathing and had no pulse. The medical staff performed CPR but she was unresponsive. She had lost the battle against fate for the very last time. 

The doctors and nurses were shocked that she had died. After doing a scan they determined that she had an aneurysm in her brain that had ruptured within that twenty-minute period between the nurse’s checks, causing a cerebral hemorrhage. 

I have only three memories of her. The first was my third birthday. My dad had gotten me a computer for my birthday (the good old boxy, 50 lb CRT monitor and computer tower, circa <2000s). It was a surprise and sitting outside my bedroom door giggling with my mom I didn’t know what he was doing, making all that noise in there setting it up. The next two memories are both within a few hours before and after she died. In my mind I vaguely remember being inside a hospital room, the outside pitch-black. I remember what I assume is her in the hospital bed. I don’t remember the mood being somber. I remember we were there visiting her and nothing was sad or depressing, as we didn’t know anything was wrong with her. We were happy and acting like it was any other day, and that her being in the hospital was a minor inconvenience. 

My last memory of her is when she was dead. I remember being in a hospital waiting room, and I believe my grandparents and a couple of aunts and uncles were with us. I remember walking through the halls, just my dad and I, and he asked me if I wanted to see her and say goodbye to her for the last time. I said yes, and we went to her room or wherever she was and she was just laying there flat. I kissed her cheek and said I love you. We left and were just walking around the hallway like before and after a while my dad said, do you want to say goodbye to her again, just one last time. I said yes again and we went back and I kissed her again one more time and told her I loved her one more time. We left, doing what we were doing before and just walking around the hallways. Again, my dad eventually asked me if I wanted to go back, just one more time, and say goodbye to her again. I said no, I didn’t. There were chemicals on or around her or something, and it made her smell weird and bad and I didn’t like it. So I said no.

I don’t know if these memories are real. It’s a good chance that they’re false memories, just something that eventually developed in my child’s mind. But I’m pretty sure they’re real, or at least they’re based on real memories that occurred. I try not to be mad at myself; I was only three, my world was black and white. But I can’t help but feel that I should have done it, should have said goodbye one more time.

When I was younger I used to pretend that my mom really was alive, that she really was working for the government and had to fake her death and that someday when I was older she would be able to come back and secretly visit and tell me it was all a misunderstanding and that she really wasn’t dead and had to pretend for the safety of herself and our family. I knew in my heart that it wasn’t real of course, but I’m sure I was not the only girl with a deceased mother who pretended that.

I only have a few items of hers I’ve been able to round up over the years. Her glasses, jewelry, work badge, large make-up case (saved in the attic for 13 years with dozens of eyeshadow and lipsticks and other makeup still in it, frozen in time. I found one of her favorite dresses at my grandma’s house when I was around thirteen, sifting through my mother’s hope chest. When my grandma came in and saw that I had found it, she smiled. “I remember that dress. Your mom wore it when she and your dad and Grandpa and I went to see “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Salt Palace. I think we got it at somewhere like… Dillard’s? No, I’m pretty sure it was Nordstrom.” Going through some of my grandma’s old pictures, I found a picture of the night they went. My mom is wearing the dress, with her hair down and her typical large smile spread across her face. Whenever I look at pictures of her, I study the eyes and the smile and think, she really didn’t know what was coming for her, did she?

At night I clutch the dress in my arms, holding it tight, inhaling that musty-yet-sweet smell of years passed in a cedar chest. It is soft to the touch, cool against my face, and makes me almost believe that my mother is here. I talk to it sometimes, pretending it is her. When I hug it, I hug my mom. When I tell her that I love her, it is she who hears it, not a piece of lifeless red fabric. One may chalk it up to madness; I chalk it up to grief.

The dress is among the few things I have left of a person I do not remember, aside from a few memories. It represents the person who loved singing alto in various choirs. It represents the person who would sneak microwave popcorn into movies using her purse. It represents the person who dedicated her life to her family and to her career as a psychiatric nurse. It represents the person who dealt with kidney disease and dozens of surgeries, along with a few near-death experiences. It represents the person who longed for a child for years, and in turn received two miracle babies.

Now, she and the sadness from her death are not supposed to exist in our seemingly happy and normal family. But when I have no one else to turn to, the dress with the remnants of a person long gone will always be there to comfort me.