I cannot help but recall what happened at this hospital 15 years ago.
My mother’s march toward death began in a room like this, a hand sanitizer station fixed to a wall, tubes for oxygen behind a bed.
I am here for minor surgery on my mother-in-law, but as I settle in for a long wait, I realize it was on the floor above me that Mom and I spent our last days together.
She’d fallen and broken her hip, but doctors advised she wouldn’t likely be able to get off life support after surgery, so I took her home. I impossibly imagined she would live two more months.
Instead, she died 33 hours later.
After all this time, after so much has evolved within me and around me, I still yearn for her wisdom, for her smile, for her undying love.
Why is the death of a mother so hard?
Love is only part of the answer to this question.
A mother is like a length of yarn or thread that runs through her child’s life. That thread is there whether she is a good mother or a not-so-good mother.
When death yanks on this thread, we become undone like an unraveled sweater.
She was here. Always here. And now she is gone. How can that be? How? How?!!?
It feels so impossible because mothers are at the very foundation of our being. She not only loved us – she helped us survive.
That reliance often continues through adulthood. Everyone may abandon us – but not mother, our first best friend, our lasting best friend. In our worst woes, she is a shelter.
Psychology Today published an article in 2022 about what happens immediately after your told mom is dead. (You can read that article here.)
“The known becomes the unknown, the predictable because uncertain, and warring emotions compete – starting immediately with the shock that someone so integral to your presence can suddenly just be gone,” the article says.
Finding healing through grief during holidays
After 15 years, I can tell you that almost unbelievably, life can be beautiful again after the death of a mother. It will happen in bits and pieces at first and feel impossibly hard.
For a long time, there will be surprising triggers – such as her favorite can of soup on a grocery store shelf – and predictable ones, such as Mother’s Day and Christmas.
We adjust in degrees. At Mother’s Day, I am not quite as reactive to the greeting cards at Walmart as in years past, but I still feel a little stab in my heart when I pass the aisle.
And don’t even get me started with going to church and facing “Happy Mother’s Day” recitations. (You can read my post, Please Don’t Say Happy Mother’s Day, here.)
Sitting with the grief – what I call grief appointments – helps. You give yourself permission to cry and think out this loss.
You are working through a core transition, from her being here to her not being here.
At first, all I could see was the loss. What I did not have.
I then began to see her smiling, as if she was watching over me.
She is not present tangibly, but whether she is with me in a spiritual way or through all the things she weaved into me over all those years, I am content. Temporarily. My hope is in seeing her again. And I wait with enthusiasm for that day.
It makes perfect sense that a mother’s death changes us forever. In ways she was possibly unaware, her profound presence leaves us with a core imprint of her love and care.
As we hold onto that, it will carry us through.
Copyright © 2024 by Toni Lepeska. All rights reserved. www.tonilepeska.com
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