*Deep breath*
I confess I’ve been procrastinating. This post will probably take about 15 minutes to write, but I keep putting it off because it’s hard.
Sunday will be 20 years since my mom died. Right after, I kept thinking, kept telling myself, that if I could just get through the first year, it would get easier.
Nope.
I actually remember having a conversation with my brother about how it was so hard now, but we will blink and 20 years will have passed. Well, here we are. I’m not going to say it’s any easier. Anyone in a conversation with me about my mom can see that I still tear up. But I will say that it’s gotten easier to deal with the very particular and cruel kind of pain of a parent lost too soon.
What makes it even more difficult is a set of thoughts I have had fairly often since she died: Who would I be had she lived?
The fact of the matter is that emotionally, I was highly dependent on my mother, to the point of unhealthiness. She had a very serious case of Crohn’s disease, and when I first got sick, we unconsciously built this club of two, an exclusive little club that excluded people who couldn’t understand our challenges. The diabetes diagnosis and later complications made it worse. Now I was chronic, an even more specific alignment.
Our need to cling to each other is understandable, I think. She was only 28 when she got her diagnosis, but she had dealt with the symptoms since she was 12. The ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s (the decades I can speak to – I’m sure pre-70s was worse) were not friendly times for people with health issues. Few treatment regimens went beyond the archaic, and there were few legal protections or avenues to promote empathy. People like us were to be pitied, not understood. Our little club was how we protected ourselves and each other. But we should have at least brought the rest of the family inside. We didn’t, and it harmed us.
As time progressed and diagnoses mounted, I became more and more dependent – it was me and her against the world. And so, when she died, it felt like I had lost more than just a parent (yes, I know that there is no such thing as “just” a parent, but you get what I mean). I find it interesting that the first thing I did, within days, was run to one of the two other emotionally safe spaces I had outside my family. I couldn’t stay forever though, and a few months later I lucked into a new safe space closer to home.
But I keep going back to that question – if my mother’s death hadn’t cut the cord, who would I be right now? What would I be? Almost certainly I would be less independent. Would I be driven? Outgoing? Resilient? Confident? Wading through all of that, it comes down to, would I be someone I like as much as I like this person I was forced to be?
Even thinking that is horribly guilt-inducing. Even typing that emotionally this might have been better for me feels like a betrayal, as was the process of acknowledging the imperfection of my mother as a human being and taking her off the pedestal where I had placed her. That happened what, about 15 years ago, and I still feel bad about it. It was the first time that I realized that no one belongs on a pedestal no matter how much you admire them. But my brain never allows me to go back and examine the discussions with my therapist that allowed it to happen, even though seeing her as a flawed human person makes me feel closer to her.
I don’t want to think that it’s better this way, and there is a strong likelihood that she would have kicked me out of the club when she realized it wasn’t healthy. Yes, she would have realized if she hadn’t already. She tended to do that kind of thing if she thought it best for us, but her pancreatic cancer made her need me more than ever, so she didn’t.
I’m grateful for that. Our closeness enabled me to throw myself into her end-of-life care. It allowed me to do the hard parts without qualm, embarrassment, or pity, and without her feeling humiliated. I was able to do everything I could, so I have no regrets.
A lot has happened in 20 years. I think a lot about the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’. It’s human nature to wonder. But all I’ve got is what is. If it had to be this way, I’m sure that everything she gave me went into the person I am now. It’s good.
A note for my dad: I can’t bear to contemplate what will happen when I lose my dad. If the thought gets even a little tiny toehold in my brain, I chase it away, because I just can’t handle it. It’s worse than contemplating my own death, which induces hyperventilation and panic attacks.