My mourning

The mind is an amaz­ingly com­plex net­work. So many thoughts, mem­o­ries, fath­om­ings and ideas all inter­con­nected. Tightly woven into a web such that it could prob­a­bly hold water. And for a point of that net to be irrepara­bly scarred by the loss of a loved one causes a chain reac­tion, your whole mind becomes affected.

My mourn­ing has been extremely pri­vate. And to many, prob­a­bly mostly unsee­able. I am a strong man, emo­tion­ally I come to terms with the sit­u­a­tion I am faced and I accept it as real­ity. I remem­ber when I was a child and I lost my friend George. At that age I went through all the phases of mourn­ing. I rejected it as real­ity. I got angry. I tried to rea­son with God. I went through all the phases and entered a deep depres­sion. It was only when a fam­ily from church invited me to go with them to Dis­ney one day that I came out of it.

I won’t relive the details of the day of George’s pass­ing, but I do vividly recall the par­ents call­ing me and my younger sis­ter into their room, sit­ting us down and telling us that George had died. I can’t begin to com­pre­hend how dif­fi­cult and how painful that was for them to do. I mean, who thinks that one day they’ll tell their 10 year old son that his best friend died? It’s an unthink­able event and to con­sider it seems unthinkable.

I believe that from that young expe­ri­ence with the mourn­ing process I came to a deeper under­stand­ing of it. And that had a pro­found influ­ence on me and a deep hand on influ­enc­ing how I han­dled my mother’s passing.

On the day, my dad asked every­one who was present, fam­ily or close friend, whether the believed it was time to take her off life sup­port and I remem­ber a very unusual feel­ing of calm as I told him that I felt it was time. Some­thing I said in the blog post on my mom’s blog was that we (she and fam­ily) had agreed to fight to the end, but not past it. And it was unan­i­mously agreed that we had reached that point. So when the time came, while I was for it, I could not go in to watch it. I couldn’t have han­dled that.

In the weeks after, I drew strength from the need around me. Those who know me know all to well that I am often dri­ven to be the strength for oth­ers. A trait my mother always loved about me and told me so in no uncer­tain terms. So for the weeks after­ward I buried myself in the life around me. I helped anchor my father through this time, I did my best to keep in touch with fam­ily, and I threw myself back into work and school before most peo­ple ever expected me to return.

You can’t pre­dict the rough days, there’s no fore­cast­ing it. Some­thing will hap­pen or some mem­ory will trig­ger it and sud­denly I’ll be in a down­ward spi­ral. I’ll miss her. I’ll again real­ize that I’ll never again hug her, or smile at her, or see her. She won’t be there when I accom­plish some­thing. She won’t be there for my wed­ding. She won’t hold my first child. She won’t share in the joy. Those are the hard­est things to accept.

I’ve been reminded numer­ous times that she never leaves me, she’s always there for me in the ethe­real sense. But to be blunt, that isn’t the phys­i­cal sense. There was no greater peace than hug­ging my mom. Not back­pack­ing. Not anything.

I have always, in no uncer­tain terms, noted my sta­tus as a ‘mama’s boy’ and I hold to it. While this all has brought me closer to my dad, I still miss my mom. I miss her so much.

Some­thing which was unset­tling for a while was the fact that I haven’t cried since mom’s memo­r­ial ser­vice. I’ve welled up and I’ve got­ten emo­tional, there have been a few days where it has been too much for me and were it not for my friends and fam­ily I would have crum­bled on those days. But I haven’t shed a tear for her mem­ory. I don’t say this with pride, I wish I could cry for her. It’s some­thing which made me extremely uncomfortable.

The fact that I didn’t ran­domly cry or didn’t go through the phases of mourn­ing caused me a lot of dis­com­fort. I thought there was some­thing wrong with me. It caused me to won­der stu­pid things like if I loved her so much, why hadn’t her pass­ing tore me apart? And only in the past few weeks did I real­ize that it did not tear me apart because she raised me to han­dle this sort of thing. She raised me to be strong and resilient and to be able to han­dle just about anything.

I keep things around. I have the pro­gram from her memo­r­ial ser­vice on my wall. I wear the sil­ver neck­lace that I’ve always men­tally attached to her. I drive her car and I keep an angel pin pinned to the ceil­ing. But even with­out those things I keep her in me.

Friends assure me that it will become eas­ier with time, and I know they are right, but for now I con­tinue on as I always have. To most I am the same. To the trusted few, they see me at my weakest.