End to a means means the end

When I started this, my intent was to be honest, with myself and with my readers.  I’m afraid I haven’t been honest.  I realized that tomorrow morning at 4:15 am it will be a month since my mom has been gone.  My life has been turned upside down for nearly a month now.  I am far enough away to try to be honest about the pain which has started to ease into a dull ache.  

I don’t know what you’re going through but I do understand your pain.  I share it.  The loss of a parent is never easy.  Having faith will help sustain you in the long run but it doesn’t save you from the pain that consumes you.  I’ve learned that is a process you just have to endure.  

I know that when she died, I thought of heaven a lot.  I wanted to be there, where she was.  I thought of how heaven is supposed to be a place where there is no more pain or sorry and I longed to be there with an intensity that was nearly obsessive.  I thought about it a lot.  

I didn’t realize at the time how much I really wanted to go where she was, escape the pain that filled me.

Last night I spoke to my dad.  He’ll be returning home at last.  I don’t know what that will be like for him to come back to her house.  My brother still doesn’t talk to me.  It’s almost as if they resent me living here.  But then, I have spent a month surrounded by her things mostly grieving.  Maybe they need the same thing, time to get used to breathing without her.

My other half said I could have gone to lay her to rest.  I can honestly admit that I didn’t want to do that, put her body in the ground.  While they were laying her to rest, I was living here, amongst her things and mourning, dying a little inside every second of the day.  But I’ve had the time to work through my pain; I had no choice, life kept moving on despite my best efforts to make it stop.

This is me, admitting that after they left, I went to a place I hadn’t expected to go.  I never really admitted this and I am doing so now because I need to be honest with myself.  Maybe it’s a part of the grieving process and but I thought of heaven entirely too much.  I longed to go there just so the pain would stop.  It hasn’t stopped and I sometimes wonder if it ever will.  

Robin William’s death made me realize that I needed to stop thinking about heaven.  I felt alone.  I still do.  When I am surrounded by my sons and their father, I feel less alone.  But mostly, I just feel alone.  I want to be in a place where I remember what it feels like to be happy again.  I don’t think I would recognize it if I encountered it.  

If you think I thought about it, I did.  But in the end, my mother’s voice admonishing me for not thinking of my sons stopped me.  So I stopped thinking about heaven.  I made myself stop.  But there are moments, when the pain is so intense, the grief and loneliness so overwhelming that I start thinking about it again.  I miss her.  She’s in a place where pain, sickness, and sorrow can’t touch her.  I think I want to go there still but the strings tied to my heart holds me back, makes me hesitate.  So for the moment, I am safe from my thoughts.  

Forgive me, but I wasn’t as strong as I would like to have been.  I have lost my footing and I can’t seem to find it.  I am hanging from the edge of the cliff and there is no one there to save me.  This is about as honest I can bring myself to be at this time.  Maybe when I’m farther away from that moment still I can actually admit the truth, even to myself.

An unorthodox date night

In the movie Date Night, Steve Carrel and Tina Fey’s married characters had a very unorthodox date night that involved criminals, guns, and car chases.  Nothing spices up a marriage quite like an exciting date night.  The last time my other half and I had planned a date night, my mother had spent her last weekend at the hospital.  I had only planned on spending Friday night with her and had every hope of being able to attend the “Date Your Mate” event at my church.  Seemed like a good idea to spend quality time together with other Christian couples.  We’re Christians and sometimes, we do like fellowship with other Christian couples.  Sometimes, we just prefer going it solo.  As it turned out, it was not meant to be.  

Now, nearly four weeks after my mother’s death, and eight weeks since that failed date night, we had a date night of sorts last night.  After weeks of not being able to spend any quality time together, we finally got an impromptu date night because I had to take my other half into the ER and he ended up needing an emergency surgery to have his appendix removed. 

I once crashed into the back of a parked car and totaled my old car.  It was a traumatic event.  I didn’t want to drive.  The other half made me get back behind the wheel and drive until I got my confidence back.  This was a little like that.  Coming in the ER, waiting to be seen, going with him to for the catscan and then waiting for him to get out of the OR was all very surreal and familiar.  It’s strange but last night, I seemed to have retraced my footsteps through the corridors of this hospital from three years ago to three months ago.  There were things, places, and faces that were eerily familiar. 
  

I looked at him and realized how someone younger and healthy looks going through the same processes my mother went through.  They put in an IV, gave him saline solutions, medications, before taking him into the OR.  They did the same thing.  I stood beside his bed and remembered the spot where I was standing with my father when the doctor had first named her cancer.  I remembered the corner where her bed had stood when they brought her out of the first surgery.  I remembered the waiting area by the rear entrance where we all entered and had waited because we could see her only one at a time.  

As I looked at my other half, as he slowly began his emergence from the anesthesia induced slumber, it struck me how different he looked from when I first saw my mom.  It pays to be married to an Englishman.  That stiff upper lip British thing can be very comforting.  He had a great sense of humor as he struggled to slowly wake up.  He told me he had Popeye feet.  Took me a while to figure out he meant the little pressure cuffs they put on the feet to ensure there were no blood clots.  My mother had looked far worse but then it could be that I saw her much earlier in the recovery process than I did my other half.

I haven’t written because I have been too focused on the pain.  Sometimes, when the pain is very intense it’s hard to focus on anything else.  It hasn’t been easy living in her house, surrounded by her things, and missing the vital things that were such a huge part of my life before August 16, 2014.  It hasn’t been easy combining my life with the one she left behind in her house.  But while being in her house has been painful, it has also been comforting because I am surrounded by her.  I miss her and I accept that it may take me a very long time to emerge from this but I know I will one day.  I have that hope.  

I can’t imagine what it must be like for my brother.  I feel very bad for him because in a way, I can understand how close he was to her.  I have sons and I see it in their faces when they miss me.  I am torn.  The big sister in me wants to help make it better for him so he doesn’t hurt.  But I saw the look on his face when he walked into her house and encountered me.  I feel helpless because I can’t really help him.  I spoke to my mother-in-law at length to try to figure this out but right now my life is in a limbo until my father comes home.  I am living in her house because she entrusted me with the task of bringing love and laughter back into that house.  How can I deny her that even if the task is going to be perhaps my biggest challenge?  

I don’t know so many things, but I’m choosing not to dwell on the things I don’t know but concentrate on the choices I can make.  I have one purpose, take care of the ones she left behind.  Sitting here, beside my other half’s hospital bed, I realize the gift my mother left me in her passing.  She helped me grow up in a way I never did.  She finally severed the umbilical cord that had bound me to her since birth with her death.  This ache that I feel inside, the empty void, they will never be satisfied, not in this lifetime.  

I think I saw a glimmer of hope today that I hadn’t seen before.  I’m not there yet, but I will get to that place where I’ll be happy again.  One day.  For today, I’ll take the wonder of this unorthodox date night and be grateful that God is still in control of the details of our lives.  The things we can’t see, the road blocks that lie ahead, he makes provisions for us because he knows we will encounter them.  I’m choosing to have faith and trust in God with my innermost thoughts and desires.  I’ve got nothing else because I don’t know what the future looks like here on out.  This future is not one I had ever dreamed of so I must put my trust in someone greater than me to help guide me through this. 

Through it all, I am choosing to say thank you, even for this hiccup because through this visit to the hospital, he has helped me overcome a very difficult season in my life.  I can now move on from this place without pain or sorrow.  It’s just a hospital and they do a pretty good job taking care of you when you get here.  The pain of learning that I was going to lose her within these walls has lessened and they don’t have any hold over me.  I spent all night walking, retracing my footsteps when I was on her journey with her and I have found that I will treasure even the memories of pain and heartbreak that came from this place.

The side effect of guilt

It’s been over three weeks since she’s gone home.  I miss her terribly.  I have moved into the phase of grief where I find it hard to believe that she’s no longer here.  How is that possible?  How is it possible that someone I’ve known from the moment I took my first breath, the arms that first held me, the heart that loved me unconditionally be gone?  I’m here, so isn’t that proof enough that she was here?  How is she not here?  My brain just can’t seem to compute.  I’ve spent the last week moving so I’ve been too exhausted to think.  But now I’ve gone back to work, my son has gone back to school, and life is slowly going back to normal.  Which leaves me with a lot to think about.  I suppose thinking is better than crying rivers.

The saying hind sight is 20/20 is very appropriate.  I’m far enough away from all the events to be able to think about them in a different perspective.  She was hospitalized the first time this year, five days after my son’s 5^th birthday.  She went in to be treated for pneumonia and that’s how we learned that her cancer had returned and this time it had spread into over 95% of her lungs.  The doctor’s wanted to run a second cat-scan and I told her that I would come back and go with her.  The test was scheduled for after 11 pm at night and my dad needed to sleep and my brother had to go home. 

She had said it was unnecessary.  The reason I had volunteered was because she had said she didn’t feel comfortable being alone during the test.  It frightened her a little.  My dad said not to waste my time.  I told her to her face that in my 36 years, I never bothered to listen to her so I wasn’t about to start now so she could stop wasting her breath.  Just accept that I was going to do what I was going to do.  I came back the next day a few minutes before 11 pm, right before her test.  When I walked in the door, she said simply that she thought I wasn’t coming.  All I said was that I said I was going to come so I came.  I was delayed, I explained, because I had to feed her grandsons and put them to bed. 

In that moment, I saw how much my presence meant to her.  Whatever I may have thought or felt in the past, in that moment I knew that no matter what, I had to be with her.  As much as she loved my dad and her son, I was a part of her, the part that was the most like herself and she needed me in a way that I needed her.  We sat and talked until the transporter came to take her for her test.  She introduced me to everyone we passed.  She would say this is my daughter, like she was showing off something that she loved and was very pleased to have. 

If you know anything about me and my relationship with my parents, I am the self-proclaimed black sheep of the family.  About the time I graduated from high school I appeared to have stopped doing things they approved of.  Yeah, I still can’t seem to care for that approval enough to change.  Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind having it, but I no longer require it with the same intensity that I did in my youth. 

When we got back to her room, she took a short nap and I napped with her.  My intent was to wait until she fell asleep.  I told her that I would leave after she fell asleep.  She said it was too dark.  I told her I’ve driven back from Brooklyn, by myself after 2 in the morning.  My tone may have been that semi sarcastic tone every parent has heard their child use.  But she insisted that it wasn’t safe to drive since it was so dark.  There comes a moment when the daughter steps back and the mother comes to the front.  The mother in me heard what my mother wasn’t saying.  She didn’t want to stay in the hospital alone.  I said, fine, I’ll stay but I had to leave early in the morning. 

I told my husband that I was staying the night over.  The poor man didn’t sleep well.  I didn’t either despite the nurses hooking me up with a decent reclining chair.  But we slept for 3 hours.  I woke up when she did.  We talked for an hour or two.  Right now I don’t really remember what we talked about.  Then we went to sleep again.  It was not the most comfortable sleep I had.  I sacrificed a good night’s sleep in my comfortable bed because my mother needed me to be there with her.  It’s not that as if I could do anything for her, but that she found something in my presence that she wanted.  I have never been able to deny my mother anything despite my rocky, less than ideal relationship with her.  She used to say that I’ve been giving her trouble since the day I was born.  

I left her the next morning riddled with guilt and regret.  I know, you didn’t expect me to say that did you?  It’s true.  The person who swore up and down that I will live my life in such a way that when I stand in the doorway to eternity and look back on my life, I will have no regret.  Up until that moment, I’ve never had any regrets.  I’ve known plenty of moments and occasions that could warrant feelings of regret but truthfully, I’ve never had any regrets.  It struck me hard that I had regrets.  I felt guilty that my mother might be facing death and I wasted 36 years of my life when I could have had more moments with her like the ones I had that night in her hospital room.  I knew true regret. 

I wrestled with these emotions for a good long while.  Eventually, my desire to not have any regret in my life won out over my feelings of guilt and regret.  That’s when I began to see and absorb all the other things in my life.  I didn’t know how much time I would get with her, but I was determined to do what I could, even if it meant just sitting with her and doing nothing.  Which is what I did. 

My parents don’t believe one should ever sit idle and do nothing.  I’m the queen of doing nothing.  They think I waste a lot of time.  Funny thing is, I did waste a lot of time, sitting with her, just being with her.  But for the first time in my life, I stopped being Martha and became Mary, sitting simply at the feet of Jesus, soaking in his presence.  I got to experience the love of my mother; I got to share her faith very intimately.  Because I tossed my guilt and regret to the curb, God gave me the opportunity to sit with my mother and share in a profoundly spiritual journey born of hope.  I have hope that this separation is momentary and one day I will see her again and we will both sit together in the presence of God. 

Guilt and regret will only chain you to the past.  The past is behind you.  Leave the guilt and regret where they belong, at your feet and keep walking forward.  Life really is too short.  It should be lived, savored.  Choose to live and savor every moment and take the time to thank God for every breath you take.  I watched my mother struggle for every breath she took.  The breaths I take are very precious.  I am filled with gratitude for every one of them.