Aw, thanks for remembering and asking @TheShellBeach - so they discharged her from hospital, in what I considered was an unsafe discharge - they sent her home alone in a taxi at 7pm on the Thursday when I had already told them I was not going to be there, although in the end she coped okay. She then pressed her lifeline at 4am on Sunday morning and they called an ambulance for her, and she died of something completely unrelated to any of the more recent issues just under 24 hours later, just over a week ago. I saw her the day after she was discharged, and DD and I spent all day with her at hospital last Sunday. The surgeon was lovely and said he would talk to us about operating, though he was clearly trying to dissuade us, given her condition and the fact that she would be severely disabled afterwards everyone agreed that this was not a good plan, so some common sense there! We didn't quite get there when we got the call just after midnight to come back in, she died much quicker than anyone was expecting after her admission, although obviously in a way that was good.
So there we go, it strikes me there are two ways of waiting for people to die on this thread, one is when they are clearly at the end of life and on a palliative care pathway but they take a long time to actually go, my DF was a bit like this. And the other way is the way of my DM where they nearly die many times over an extended period (5 years in our case) but have period of being okay in between.
I feel okay, I think I am still in shock, but she was 91 and she lived independently at home other than those hospital admissions right till the end which I call a good result really. But honestly, I think it will take a while for my sympathetic nervous system not to be activated all the time. @thesandwich said to me on another thread, the crisis is over now, which made me cry at the time because it has been one crisis after another for five years, and this is what brought it home to me that I no longer needed to live in a state of crisis.
I have very mixed feelings; obviously my mother dying is a loss, but it's also a gain and a complete mental shift that I no longer need to consider in my long or short term plans. I did wonder whether there's a need for a further thread, if one doesn't exist, for people who are graduating from this one to get our heads around what can be a huge change!
Hope everyone is doing okay, you think it's never going to be over, but then one day it is. I discovered after DM had died that DD had made some recordings of her talking about her life, this is one thing I regret that I could've also done. I also sort of regret lots of other things, when I was annoyed or impatient or said no, but I'm not super human and my needs are also important and I did the best that I possibly could in the situation in which I was in.