I had known my mother was sick for several months before she passed away. I have a few thoughts now that I am a few weeks away from it all.
- I actually feel better now, after the loss, than I did in the weeks and months before she passed away. Right before she passed away, I felt terrible almost every hour of every day. I still had to go to work and participate in every day life though. You might be surprised to know that I also felt bad for most of the summer ever since I found out. I felt like I had to fake it though. I tried to have a positive attitude for her but it was really hard. I would tell friends about what was going on and they would tell me how there were really a lot of treatments now for cancer and I would just nod along. I felt like I had to validate what the person who I was talking to was telling me. I knew in my heart that things were serious but I didn’t want to come off as a buzz kill when people would try to tell me that cancer treatments had come a long way. I did sometimes believe that things would be okay but sometimes I felt like I had to reassure the person I was talking to so that they would not be upset. It took a lot of energy to have those conversations. So in that respect, right now I feel better. There are times now though that I would rather have all that anxiety but still still have my mother with me right now but I know that won’t be the best thing for her.
- The thing I feared the most for a while, her passing, actually felt okay when it happened, like opposite Thanksgiving. Opposite Thanksgiving is what I named the weekend before the funeral when me and my whole family got together for the viewings with the funeral on Monday. We had some intense, close family time. We did a lot of laughing and hanging out. We ate delicious food and drank good too. At times, we were having a pretty good time. It was always in the back of my mind though, that we were having a good time but she would never again join us for these good times.
- Since her death, I have enjoyed a closeness to my family and friends that has been pretty wonderful. My nuclear family has always been pretty tight and I have enjoyed a close relationship with many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Yet, I feel like people have encircled us and held us close to help us in a way that I didn’t realize would happen before. It feels warm and fuzzy and helps me realize just how many people are in my court.
- It still seems crazy to me that she is not here anymore. I have a time every day when I have to remind myself that she is not here anymore because it is hard to believe. Sometimes I have to say it out loud; sometimes I have to repeat it to myself several times in a row. I think back to this time last year when she and my Dad came to my place to babysit Mr. Man so my husband and I could go away on a Babymoon. She didn’t know then that she was sick or that was going to be sick soon. I had no idea that this all was going to happen. It seems unbelievable now. I am glad that we didn’t know then. My parents had a nice weekend with Mr. Man and my husband and I had a nice weekend away. In the past year, my mother and I saw a lot of each other. She and my father came for almost a week when Baby Nugget was born in February and she came back for another stretch in April. We saw each other on two visits in June, one visit in July and I visited in August and October. Some years we don’t see each other as many times so it seems weird that during a year where I have seen her a lot, I won’t see her again.
- Some books aren’t minefields for me anymore, but some still are. Before she passed away, but after I knew that she was sick, I would sometimes come upon things that would become minefields for me at work. For instance, I was once reading book reviews at my library when I first found out about my Mom and I saw one for a book called: Cancer Looks Good on You. Reading the review kind of made me gag because the review made it see like cancer was something that could look good on a person but also a thing where death was the inevitable. I wasn’t ready to think about it at the time. Another time I came upon someone at work asking me for the play Our Town and it made me want to cry because I remembered the ending where the main character Emily dies. Finally, once I saw Elizabeth Kuber-Ross’s On Death and Dying and I got out of that section in a hurry. I also hid my son’s book called The Roller Coaster Kid because it is about a family where the grandma dies and I gave away our copy of I Will Love You Forever because I couldn’t read that book without crying before all this happened. I am finding now that those same things aren’t as upsetting as they once were. I can walk around the shelves at work without being afraid of what I might see but I still don’t think I can stomach children’s books where the mother dies.
Until next time!
