If you had told me this time last month that this is where I would be today, I would have had a lot of questions. I still have a lot of questions, and they’re likely never going to get answered.

On Sunday morning, at around 11:35 am, my mom passed away peacefully in the ICU of Guelph General Hospital. She just drifted off into a forever sleep, which is almost as hard to write as it was to watch.

One day she was fine and the next day she woke up with stomach pain, back pain and nausea in the early morning, and when she was finally convinced to go to the hospital, the diagnosis was pancreatitis. It turns out that your pancreas is not a master organ, at least until it’s sick and then it can have an impact on a whole assortment of important organs like your liver and your kidneys. The doctor told us that a healthy 35-year-old can come into the hospital with pancreatitis and leave it like a frail older person with months of rehab ahead of them. What hope did a 75-year-old diabetic have?

For a while though there was hope. It was a pretty big victory they day we were told that mom was *not* the sickest person in Guelph Hospital. That was the first weekend in the ICU and things very slowly went downhill from there. Hospital pro tip: You know something bad is coming when the social worker appears with the doctors doing rounds.

We had *The Meeting* on Thursday. We were told that mom was so sick that it was beyond her body’s ability to heal. Have you ever heard of the Kennedy Terminal Ulcer? I hadn’t, but apparently you get them when you’re bed ridden and near death. It’s a sign that your body is shutting down. We can say that we made the decision, but truthfully it had already been made. Mom was moved to end of life care on the weekend, and once the machines were disconnected, she was gone in almost no time at all.

It’s all still so hard to believe. For the last few years, I’ve been my mom’s caretaker. It’s not that she was feeble, but someone needed to be around to give her extra help. I ran her errands, helped her around the house, and assisted when she needed I.T. support (obviously). Admittedly, I’m personally at a loss beyond the fact that mom has died. Life has changed for me in a pretty big way, and I have no idea where I’ll be in the short-term, or the long-term for that matter. There’s a lot for me to figure out, and I’m struggling with where to begin.

I guess I’ll start by saying thank you. Thank you to the staff of Guelph General Hospital for giving my mom such good care in what ended up being her last days. This goes double for Carla, who was my mom’s nurse on Sunday when she passed. Carla was very sweet, and kind, and gentle. She was a reassuring voice and presence in some very uncertain times.

I also want to thank the Wall-Custance Funeral Home and Chapel where we’re having mom’s memorial service later this week. They made it very easy to arrange things, and it’s through them we’re dedicating a tree in the Arboretum to our mom, which is exactly how she would have wanted to be memorialized.

Finally, and this is a weird one, I want to thank Bonnie Durtnall. I bought her book Haunted Guelph for mom for Christmas, and she had begun reading it and talking about all the haunted places in Guelph we should visit. Mom loved local history, and ghost stories, so I took the book to the hospital one day to finish it with her. It was a bizarre kind of comfort reading to her local ghost stories while on her death bed, but it was comfort, and I’m grateful to Bonnie for that.

Also of some comfort is my Guelph Politico work. It’s been a relief at times to have had something else to focus on in the last few weeks, and I’m going to make an effort to get back to a semi-normal work schedule next week as I try to figure out what comes next.

My thanks to everyone that’s reached out to me and my family during this very difficult time, I’ve appreciated everyone’s well wishes and warm thoughts. Thank you for your patience as politics have had to take a backseat while I’ve been dealing with some very real, real world stuff.

I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Adam