Blogging my way through the grief over the loss of my mother. At just shy of age 34 it seems unimaginable I'd be in this position, but welcome to the latest twist in my online writing experiment. I can't say the words to follow will be inspiring, or even remotely interesting to the general reader, but to me I hope they're cathartic.
My mom Kathy fought valiantly for four years against a rare type of cancer called Leiomyosarcoma. She was diagnosed in June of 2013, though we knew something was wrong for months before. She was having trouble walking, and it eventually turned out that she had large tumors destroying each of her hip joints. The odds of surviving for more than a couple years aren't great. That she survived four years makes her one of the ones stretching the odds a bit. Having said that: I take absolutely no comfort in that fact. I will say I am thankful that she is finally out of the shear physical agony her condition caused her, especially over the last year or so. Nonetheless, losing your mother, at any age, is traumatic.
A month ago my mom came very close to dying in the hospital, but a Hail Mary guess at an infection kept her around for another month. I went through intense grief during that period and had thought that perhaps I had a lot of things out of my system, but now I'm wondering if I wasn't masking things.That close call did give me the opportunity to treasure the little time I had left with my mom all that much more.
My biggest fear at this point is the fear of being alone. While I loved caring for and just being with my mom and I wouldn't give up a second of the time I spent with her, my personal life has unfortunately stagnated. My grandmother is 89, my aunt lives halfway across the country, and it seems that much of the rest of my family is estranged. I have some great friends who stood by me, even when I dropped off the face of the earth for a year after my mom's diagnosis. But as far as a dating life, or what to fill the extra time with, I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment. I want to get into the gym, to lose some of the 50 pounds I've put on over the last year, and the other 50 that I still need to lose on top of that. I want to eat healthier, to travel more, to do so many things, but right now at the one week mark since my mom's passing, I feel like I'm barely treading water.
For much of the last four years I cared for my mom at home. Over the last year or so she went in and out of the hospital due to various disease-related issues and a local rehabilitation center to work on her leg strength. Nevertheless I still spent at least an hour with her daily and made sure to call her every night around 8:00pm. For some reason her loss hits me hardest in the evening, right around the time I'd be calling her or she'd be calling me... even though those calls would only last for a minute or two. Maybe it's the solitude of being home alone in the evening. I am hoping that when I get back to work again that maybe this intense sadness that comes over me like a tidal wave will subside over time, but right now it's almost suffocating.
Every time I feel like I'm starting to do a bit better emotionally something else comes up and whacks me back into place again. This past weekend it was the shock of losing one of my mom's long-time friends to her own cancer struggle. Today it was the blinking of my home answering machine. After a 16 year absence from my life, my father decided to call from Florida and express his condolences. I just feel like once I'm starting to get things in check, something else comes along to knock me back to square one.
Hopefully with time things will improve, but right now I almost feel I'm in a worse place than I was a week ago. Maybe it's because last week was so chaotic, or maybe it just takes that long for grief to truly take hold. Either way, I won't hesitate to ask for help or counseling if needed. I've seen what pent up and stored away emotions can do, and I have no desire for those to ruin my life.
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