I just experienced a nursing home up close and personal when my mom had to go in. She was placed in Hospice quite quickly and died after a week, but I thought about you when a pastor came around and asked to pray. It was a good time of fellowship and comfort for me even if my mom was not very aware. Bless you, Psalmist, for your years in that ministry.
Glorydaz, my most heartfelt for you as to your mom.
Please accept the following as an embrace of comfort in your moments ahead.
I have a friend who was born with a mental defect that every so often causes him to appear to lose conscious awareness through all his senses but for his sense of touch.
When that happens, he'll just stand, or sit there, and just feel around with his hands as if playing pin the tail on the donkey with a blindfold on., or as if attempting to make his way around in a dark room
Its a serious issue that could get him killed should he happen to find himself in the wrong place.
Observing him whenever that happens to him, I have concluded that he behaves that way, not because he is unaware, but because he is, at a very basic level.
This is obvious in the fact that during those moments, he behaves as if he is attempting to orient himself to his sudden loss of his sense of his surroundings with his other senses.
At some level your mom was still aware of you, especially given the mother and child bond. Just not how that is normally taken as "aware."
People have come out of comas to relate their having sensed their loved one's presence, for example.
And studies show that talking to a baby while it is still in the mom's womb will be picked on by the baby.
There is a level of awareness in all that that is not visual or verbal, and often, not even physical.
Rather, emotional; where one feels another's emotions, as babies do their mom's and mom's their babies'.
In neuroscience, this is referred to as mirror-neurons. At its subtlest expression, it enables the mom to communicate her love to her baby without words or even without holding the baby, as well as to pick up on the babies' moods, needs, love, etc., and likewise the baby to as to its mom's.
We never lose this between ourselves and those we interact with. We just tend to lose our awareness of just how aware of one another we really are.
Take all this, sis, as the poetry about you and your mom, and your mom and you, that it is meant to be.
Yours in the Son,