Chris Wiegman
Today marks two years since our life changed in ways we never expected, and never would have thought possible.
6 April, 2023
6 April, 2023 was like most days. We went for a walk, I called my mom (I remember it because I was angry about something and regretted the call after, not knowing it would be the last time I would ever talk to her) and I went to work.
It had been our first normal week in almost two months. We lost our little guy on 21 February, a few days after booking a trip to Porto that March to see if we would want to move there. We took that trip and did, in fact, decide to move to Portugal. I don’t remember what day it was specifically but I had even retained an emigration lawyer to help us with the move earlier during the week of 7 April.
Life was up and down but it seemed like we were finally going to get out of Florida, something I had been needing for years at that point, and we were finally going to be able to move abroad and try something new in an area where Joy could actually agree on the weather.
7 April, 2023
We woke up on 7 April 2023, a Friday, like any other day. We took our walk and I went to work.
Sometime around 08:00 my dad called me. That’s unusual but I didn’t think much of it. In fact I assumed it was probably a mistake (something that happened on a fairly regular basis). I answered anyway.
He was in tears, a state I had never heard.
My mom wouldn’t wake up.
She went to sleep the night before and all was well. In fact, as far as they knew, they were both perfectly healthy, though it had been years since either of them had any real checkup.
All I could do was confirm the ambulance was on the way and tell him I would be too. I called my brother and got him to reluctantly head up to help. At that point we knew it wasn’t good, but we didn’t know how bad things were.
True to my word, I bought a ticket to Chicago, leaving in a few hours, called in to work and headed to the airport. I thought I would help mom get comfortable and head home in a few days.
As I was getting out of the car at the airport I got another call from dad. This was the bad one.
They had to make a decision. Mom had a massive brain hemorrhage. The way the Dr explained it, a life-threatening hemorrhage was something around 1-3cm. My mom’s was 7 cm and had basically destroyed the left half of her brain. There was no real hope for her to regain consciousness and my father and brother had to make the decision if they wanted the Dr to try anyway.
To complicate matters they found masses throughout her body. We never found out what they were but we all knew she wouldn’t want to live like “that” and decided it was best to let nature take its course (something more than one Dr and nurse later confirmed was the right choice given the size of the hemorrhage).
I worried the whole flight. I cancelled my return trip and realized I just needed to be there.
I got to the hospital around 16:00, just in time for them to remove life-support and transfer her to hospice. We stayed with her until she passed around 01:30 in the morning on Tuesday, 11 April.
Joy drove up from Florida the day she passed and I worked on arrangements (my parents hadn’t done any planning for this until then). We agreed we would stay with my dad for a few weeks to help him transition to his new life.
Joy went back to Florida the first weekend of May and I stayed until 21 May so that we didn’t both leave at the same time.
A detour on our move
It didn’t take us long to realize that we shouldn’t be moving to Porto. We started looking for places in Chicago instead.
I left Chicago in 1998. I said I would never move back.
Joy left the suburbs with me when we moved to Hawaii and also vowed to never return with the added stipulation that she hates the cold. Not the normal way everyone says they hate winter but with a loathing of anything under scorching hot that even our Florida neighbors found weird. Porto was a stretch for her, Chicago was unthinkable.
The thing was I was still not going to stay in Florida which I had grown to hate over the years. Even Joy only wanted to stay solely for the heat (which was part of what I could no longer tolerate). The other side was the fact that my mom was the youngest of our 4 parents and none of the others are getting any younger. Add to that her sister who could use Joy’s help and it was time to go back.
Our only real goal was to be in a walking neighborhood.
Around August my dad’s cousin, Brian, told us about his place on the lake. We hadn’t looked at the area because we, frankly, didn’t think we could afford it but he proved that assumption wrong.
Brian’s place fell through but we found a place where we could see the water from our living room and we could buy it with the equity in our Florida house.
It was time to move.
7 April, 2025
Today we’re in Chicago. I’m looking at the lake on Sunday night as I write this from a condo we own.
Except for the winter, Joy enjoys it. She’s taking classes at The Second City and I went back to an on-site job to build a network again, something I should’ve done when we moved to Florida.
We spend every other weekend or so at my dad’s house where he’s managed to transition as well as can be expected.
If you had told me this is where we would be when I woke up 2 years ago today, and that my mom would be gone, I would’ve thought you were crazy.
The last two years have felt like a lifetime yet, here we are, making the best of our new lives and genuinely enjoying where we live.
Thankfully, all our other parents are still with us. I miss my mom every day and wish we could’ve spent time together with her up here but… this is life.