Grief is not a linear process. I lost my mom nearly 20 years ago to pancreatic cancer, caught late partially because her Crohn’s Disease required the use of steroids for decades. She could get down to 5 mg/day sometimes, but never off completely.
I wasn’t ready. No one is, really. For better or worse, parents shape us both consciously and unconsciously. My mother was the one who shaped how I related to my condition.
In the beginning, I would take a book up to her gravesite and sit and read, like we used to do in our living room. After a while, I went less but still thought about her all the time. I would find her in a song on the radio or in something random that felt like a practical joke.
As life got busier and busier, I always kept her close, but it became less conscious. Finally, busier and busier became burnout. Now, burnout for us can be both job-related and condition-related (or even family-related). Having to keep yourself one step ahead of your condition all the time can be even more stressful than anything job-related. There are no breaks, no quiet rooms to get away from the sometimes-chaos of it, no vacation time. Your condition care can become a frantic flailing in the dark. If you miss a step, all the dominoes can come down.
I have been flailing for a while but kept putting off anything that would address it. The more I ignored the burnout, the angrier and less patient I became. I piled stress upon stress, worrying about more things, making harmful choices. Knowing they were harmful choices even as I made them. I would make a better choice next time. I would start over tomorrow.
I knew I had to do something. The number of times I could start over was running out. My mom would have known what to do. Not so long ago, I would have known exactly what she would have said. But with the cacophony in my head, I couldn’t hear her anymore. I had to find her again.
Not at the gravesite. No, there was only one place to go. Here. Brookside Gardens. She had discovered it in college and used to study there in the 60s. After she got married and moved halfway across the country, she went home for vacations and took her kids. Us. Me.
I fought against going. It had been too long—years – and I knew I was going to take an emotional hit. Finally, one overcast morning a couple of Saturdays ago, I sucked it up and just went. I started at the greenhouses, as usual. Walked up through the yew and perennial gardens. They still have the ramps I used when I was in a wheelchair, only now they’re wooden, not metal. Stopped at the wedding gazebo at the top of the hill. Looked back. Even in winter, it’s nice to see all that tiered green. Down through the fragrance garden, over the stepping stones to the tea house. Cut off half the path by walking up the unmanicured hills to the nature center, where I spent a good half hour putting off what was coming in the library and talking to garden staff.
I started to feel it as I started the second round. Walking down through the fragrance garden again, the knot in my throat started to grow. The first tears wet my lashes as I approached the reflection terrace, a tribute to the DC sniper’s victims. I hopped up on a stone too tall for me so I could swing my feet like a kid, bounce my sneakered heels off the cold, gray granite.
There she was.
A sense of calm, of knowing, of letting go. I kept my head down, shielded by the bill of my baseball cap, so others walking through wouldn’t see. I didn’t want anyone to ask if I was ok, and there were a surprising number of people outside for February. I sat there, swinging my feet, making myself absorb the quiet, breathe deeply, feel the exhaustion and the stress. And the grief. Still the grief.
Don’t start over, she would have said of my default habit. Because starting over erases both progress and failure. Continue. Don’t move backward to the start in order to move forward.
When one walking couple got close, I scrubbed my face with the sleeve of my jacket, kept my cap low, and finished my second circuit, this time finishing in the old children’s garden, which at one time had been filled with plants that illustrated nursery rhymes. Now it was a trial garden, but the old man tree was still there, slightly stooped but still taller than anything else nearby. It was a soft, familiar end to my meanderings.
I’d found my mom, and in finding her, I found my way.