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| My mom holding my sister and me, October 31, 1985 |
As I’m typing this, it has been 12,856 minutes since my beautiful mother took her last breath, and I
have felt each minute as if it were a hundred years. I miss her more than I
thought possible. Everything is different now. It is such a puzzle to me that
the world keeps moving like nothing happened, but at the same time I find it to
be a comfort. Maybe someday my world will start moving again.
Ever since I was very small, I’ve wished I were brave and
strong. I admired the Disney heroes and tried to emulate them by defending
classmates against bullies and never backing down from a fight. I didn’t always
(or often) live up to my own expectations, but I did go to the principal’s
office a few times for fighting, and I fouled out of a basketball game once.
So, there’s that.
In more recent years, I shifted from wanting to be “brave and strong” to “I
want to be brave and strong like my mom.” Looking back, I believe that she was
always brave and strong, but it took a tragedy – the diagnosis of triple
negative breast cancer and subsequent metastases—to showcase the quiet, calm, graceful
strength my mother possessed.
I’ve recently spoken with several kind women – mostly
classmates from college—who also lost their mothers to cancer. We have our own
language now – the language of lonely girls who miss their moms. “Today sucks” doesn’t just mean that I’m
having a bad day, but that I can’t believe my best friend, mentor, and
counselor is gone, and I could really use her advice today, or that I forgot
for a minute she was gone and started to call her, or that my dad was sick with
the stomach flu and I felt sorry for him that my mom wasn’t there to tell him
to stop acting like a baby.
I’ve learned – and am still learning – that we all react
differently to grief and loss. I have been a classic textbook case so far,
exhibiting signs of all “Five Steps of Mourning:”
Denial—I didn’t want the men from
the mortuary to take her body away, because part of me didn’t believe she had
really died.
Anger—I threw a plate on the
counter and it shattered into hundreds of pieces, I have screamed and yelled
until my voice was raw, and I punched a few walls.
Bargaining—I wondered why we didn’t
find another doctor, why we couldn’t have had more time, and what would have
happened if we’d tried to save her instead of just watching her die.
Depression—I miss her. So much. I
feel lost without her. I’m so, so sad.
Acceptance—I think the only thing
I’ve accepted so far is that I’m really angry and sad.
I’m not a psychologist. But I am seeing one. I want to be
healthy and strong and to live my life without wallowing. I want peace. I want
to eventually go on with my life, holding my mother in my heart as I go, and
feeling the gift of her strength and grace inside me.
