Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (24 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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I thought back to all the times Mother complained about people shooting her in the breast, the head, and the stomach. It never occurred to us that she was talking about real pain.
I recalled my periodical calls to talk to Dad, and how he always gave the phone to Mother. She consistently answered in the same unfriendly tone.
“Hi, Mom, how are you doing?” I would chirp in my most phony happy voice.
“How do you think I’m doing?” she would begin, and then proceed to vomit all the garbage that surrounded her days.
“The FBI is shooting my head with laser beams so bad I can’t think. They know I have communist secrets. The President of the United States is trying to get information out of me, and so are the Catholics and the Armenians and the Mafia and Frank Sinatra.” From then on I couldn’t get a word in. I would lay the phone down on the bed and check in about every five minutes. She would still be talking, not fazed in the least that I had contributed nothing to the conversation. Thirty or forty minutes later I would pick up the phone and say very loudly, “I have to go now, Mother. Goodbye.” My dad mentioned that after talking with me Mother was always a little better and didn’t have to complain as much to him. I looked upon those telephone times with my mother as saving Dad’s life.
I thought about the last time I visited Mother and Dad. Out of the blue, she had popped into the den where I was sitting alone and said, “All those times I locked you in a closet... that never bothered you, did it?” The pitch of her voice came down at the end, implying that of course it never bothered me as opposed to asking a true question and looking for an honest answer.
Still, I was so shocked I could hardly speak. Was this the same woman who never admitted doing anything wrong in her life? Granted, she made it clear that she knew this closet thing was no big deal and that she was just curious, but she
did
at least admit to doing it.
I pitied her enough to not tell her the truth, but I still had sufficient fleshly qualities in me to caustically remark, “Oh, no, Mother, I loved every minute of it.”
My snideness went totally unobserved. Mother heard what she wanted to hear, and with a slight smile she replied, “I didn’t think it bothered you.” Then she returned to what she was doing in the kitchen. Part of me rejoiced because Mother finally admitted she had locked me in the closet. What provoked her to mention it after all these years I really couldn’t imagine. Maybe unconfessed sin never lets a person rest no matter what the circumstances.
While on the way to the hospital to see Mother for the last time, I thought over all these things and observed that God had left no loose ends.
Our trip took only 2½ hours, miraculously short of the four hours we had anticipated. Michael dropped me off in front of the hospital and I quickly ran up the long walkway to the main lobby while he parked the car. I asked for my mother’s room number, and when the receptionist could not locate it my heart pounded. I feared that it was too late and that she had been taken out of her room.
“No, here it is. Virginia is in Room 3A, right down the hall.”
The hospital was very small and it took only seconds to run to her room and open the door. There was no one else in the double-occupancy room but two old, very sick-looking ladies, neither of whom I recognized as my mother. The one farthest away was unconscious and hooked up to many wires, tubes, and a respirator. She had no teeth. My mother had teeth. She had never allowed a dentist to lay a hand on her.
The other woman was thin and frail, her pale blue eyes staring off to the side in a very pained and hopeless expression. “I must have the wrong room,” I thought, and started to leave. But as I took a second look just to make sure, I saw that the pale blue eyes belonged to Mother. I hardly recognized her tiny frame.
“Mom,” I said softly. “Mom, it’s me, Stormie.”
I cautiously approached her bedside. I was still afraid of her.
“Mom,” I said louder. I shook her arm. “Mom, it’s me, Stormie.”
There was no response.
I positioned myself so that her blue eyes stared directly at me. They were unseeing.
“Mom!” I began to cry. “Mom, you’re gone, aren’t you? I’m too late.”
I felt her. She was still warm. She must have died only a few seconds before I arrived.
I took her hand and held it in mine and began to cry. I laid my head on her chest and sobbed into the blanket. I didn’t cry because I missed my mother or our relationship. There had never been a relationship. No, I cried for all the things that never were. For all that never was between us. For fullness and joy of life that she never knew. I cried for the pain of a small girl who stamped her foot and talked back to her pregnant mother and then never saw her again because her mother went to the hospital that night and died. I cried for a young teenager who felt she was responsible for every death in her family. I cried for a woman who lived in fear, unforgiveness, bitterness, and rage at God and never knew His love and healing and deliverance. I cried for a woman who couldn’t accept her daughter’s forgiveness because she was unable to forgive herself. I cried for a person who never became what God created her to be. I grieved for all that, and knew it must be what God feels about
us
when we strain and strive and get ourselves into horribly painful situations when all we need to do is turn to Him and surrender.
I looked up at her face again and stroked her hair. I cried for all the years of my life I wasn’t able to touch her like that. She would never allow it.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel disappointed because I missed seeing Mother alive. Near the end of our trip to the hospital I had peace that whatever happened was God’s will. I had felt His presence all the way there, and if He had wanted me to see her alive He could easily have gotten me there 60 seconds earlier. God
had
answered my prayer by giving me peace, and I knew that I had arrived right on
His
schedule.
With still no one else in the room, I did something that might have seemed disrespectful and odd. I lifted the covers to look at Mother’s body. Her legs were beautiful—thin, with milky white skin, yet exquisitely formed. Her stomach was distended. I lifted her gown and put my hand on the area where I thought the liver would be located, and I felt a large, hard mass. I then touched her left breast and felt an enormous lump the size of half a grapefruit. It was just as I had suspected from Suzy’s telephone description: cancer taken to its final form. I marveled at how Mother must have suffered all those years without ever allowing anyone to help her. What a horrifying, awful death. It sickened me to think of the agonizing pain she must have experienced.
I pulled her gown down, laid the covers neatly back over her, and picked up her hand again. The fingers were getting cold now. I stared at her face. Her blue eyes were extra big because of her extreme weight loss. I had always thought of her as large and ugly. Now she looked tiny, frail, and pretty.
As her body cooled and became stiff, the finality of it hit me. Suddenly my mind flashed to the little church we had attended when I was 14. I remembered how she talked about God and Jesus as if they were real to her, and how dedicated she was for those few months until she threw out the large family Bible in a fit of rage. She never spoke about God again, except to say that He knew people were trying to kill her, but wasn’t able to help. Now I felt peace about her, as if God was saying, “It’s okay. Your mother is with Me. She doesn’t hurt anymore. She’s not crazy anymore. I’ve got her.”
Actually, it was a strangely peaceful time, unlike what I would have expected. Death didn’t feel so bad. Of course it was easy for me to say that, I wasn’t the one who had died. But it seemed natural—like a normal part of life.
Finally two nurses walked in, and when they realized that my mother was dead they asked me to leave the room. As I did, Michael was just coming down the hall. “She’s dead, Michael,” I said softly.
“Oh, no. We were too late?”
“Too late to see her alive,” I nodded, “but not too late in the Lord’s plan.”
When Michael and I were allowed back in Mother’s room, I saw that the nurses had closed her eyes, folded her arms, and straightened the sheet across her body. As we stood there silently, the doctor entered. He was a kindly man in his sixties.
“I’m very sorry about your mother,” he said. “There was nothing we could do. She had cancer in her breast and liver, and possibly a brain tumor as well. Her liver was five times the size of a normal liver.”
He expressed shock at how advanced the cancer had become before she permitted anyone to give her medical aid.
“Doctor, I’m grateful for all that you’ve done for my dad through these last five years, and I’m thankful you were able to alleviate Mother’s pain in the last few hours of her life,” I assured him.
“The cancer was so bad that even if your dad had brought her to me a year ago, I don’t believe I could have saved her,” the doctor went on. He had known fully about Mother’s mental condition because my dad had frequently confided in him and sought his counsel, though no one knew she was physically ill as well. “The medical expenses would have been tremendous for your dad, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. That cancer had been growing in her for many years. It was really better this way.”
“What happens now?” I said, at a loss for the next step.
“We need to call your dad immediately,” said Michael, and he left to find a phone. Dad was unprepared for Mother’s death. He had no idea she was that sick, and the shock of it put him to bed. Michael and I handled all the arrangements.
I picked out the most beautiful casket I could find and ordered large, colorful bouquets of flowers because I knew she would have thought them beautiful. I chose a burial plot under a big shade tree because she always loved trees. I also bought her new pretty underwear, and as I handed my money to the cashier, tears I had been choking back flooded down my cheeks and I began to sob. I was struck by the remembrance of all the times I had wanted to do and buy things for Mother, like I was doing and buying now, but she would never receive them from me. Now I was doing it for her funeral. The cashier gave me my change, handed me my purchase, and looked at me with great concern. She was speechless and I was glad.
My sister took Mother’s death hard. I had trouble understanding why, because I never realized that they had a relationship. I made the mistake of assuming that Suzy was the same as I was—wanting the same things, experiencing the same things. But the opposite was true; there was nothing similar about us. Suzy talked back to my mother; I cowered in a corner. She got angry and showed it; I got hurt and kept my rage inside. She had a relationship with my mother; I had none. Suzy felt grief; I felt relief. Even as children, we had been raised in two completely different worlds. I never realized any of that until now.
I was happy that I had no hard feelings toward my mother—no unforgiveness, no anger, no resentment, no unsettled scores. God had cleansed it all. Everything had been accomplished before her death, and I would never have to deal with those things again.
Word of Mother’s death traveled quickly among family and friends. We received many phone calls, and I was shocked when one woman mentioned how much my mother had cared about me.
“Your mother was always very proud of you,” said Anita, a longtime family friend who remained loyal to us even though Mother had often treated her rudely.
“Mother was always proud of me?” I asked astonished, not believing what I had just heard.
“When you starred in your high school play, she was very pleased. And she was proud of all your television shows. She never attended any of them because she thought the people who were trying to kill her might want to kill you too.”
“I can’t believe what you’re saying, Anita. Why didn’t she ever give me even the slightest indication that she felt that way?”
“You know your mother, Stormie. She had very strange ideas. She believed that if she were ever to tell you
anything
good about yourself, you would be spoiled.”
“Spoiled?” I said in amazement. “She thought if she said something nice to me I would be spoiled?”
“I’m sorry you never knew your mother when she was younger. She was a lovely woman, she really was. The mental disease took over her life and disguised anything recognizable of her good qualities.”
Unsuccessfully choking back tears I said, “Thank you, Anita. It means a lot to hear what you just said.”
I hung up the phone and cried. “Mother, why couldn’t you just once have said you were proud of me?”
After Mother’s funeral, we stayed a number of days to help Dad and then drove up every weekend for many months. His house was dirty, dark, and depressing because Mother never allowed anyone in to clean or paint. Her room was filled with thick cobwebs that hung down just like in an old horror movie. The bed was backed up to the closet so that the headboard covered the doors, preventing them from being opened. Inside, the closet was filled to the ceiling with dirty clothes and every canceled check, receipt, letter, and magazine clipping she had ever possessed.
Dad asked me to sort through her things. I didn’t blame him—he’d been through too much to do it himself. The sorting was far beyond what I anticipated. I found in the house and the adjacent shed nearly every dress, coat, shoe, or purse that I, my sister, and my mother had ever owned. It was like reliving my past to see it all. I knew she never threw anything away, but I had never imagined the extent of her hoarding. It was another sign of her mental sickness and fear.

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