Living with dying

It was pain. It was shock. It was life.
I stood over my mom, lying pale and prone in the bed, her eyes wide open and bulging, as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her.
"What's going on, Jake?" she asked.
"We're at the hospice," I said.
"We'll be going home soon," I lied.
The clarity and lucidity in her eyes faded as the drugs reasserted themselves, and she slipped once again into a morphine-clouded haze.
I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, then slipped into my own haze, one of grief and pain.
My mom is dying. There is nothing I can do about it.
Hope, once my greatest ally in our battle against mom's cancer, had deserted me. It's like that crazy homeless man on the street would scream at random, to no one in particular: Abandon all hope ye, who enter here.
"Here," is the Richmond Road hospice in Victoria. It's where my mother has come to die. She doesn't want to be here, and she doesn't want to die, but those options have been taken away from her. From us.
Time keeps on slipping, the Neville brothers say. And it does. In May, the doctors gave my mom two months to a year to live. It's been two months. The revised estimate is now measured in days. For my sister and I, we are measuring it in hours.
The sadness and emotion that clings to us now ebbs and flows like a tide. You can fend it off - or fool yourself into thinking you are - until it decides to wash over you, engulfing you, breaking down every defence you have and reducing you to a sobbing, broken shell.
It is not the impending death that is sawing into our souls. It's the suffering and frustration our mother is going through. Doped up with a myriad different medications, the pain still shows on her face; she scrunches it up like she's tasting my cooking for the first time again.
This cannot last. It can't. It just can't.

"Death's pale rider knocks at the door of kings and men alike." - Horace