Following my previous post on the impact of big life events, please know that this is about loss and grief. .
Three Weeks
This time last year my sister and I helped our mum move into her lovely new retirement flat. It was a tiring day but also one full of optimism for the new lease of life it was going to give her. The loneliness of the Covid era and numerous health struggles had hit her hard. She had been longing for a different, more simple and community-based way of life, with easier access to the things she enjoyed and the people she wanted to be with.
She loved it for precisely three weeks.
For those three weeks she arranged her new nest, made friends with some of the other flat residents and took pleasure in being able to walk to a local coffee shop and sit in the sun, feeling pleased that she had finally taken the plunge to move.
Three weeks later, she was in hospital.
Three weeks after that, she was diagnosed with incurable stage 4 cancer.
My sister and I put as much of our lives on hold as possible to help care for her and be by her side for the next awful five months. She died at the end of February, three days before my birthday and 12 days before Mother’s Day.
I can’t fully explain that time, it’s still too hard, the magnitude of emotions was immense. Some bits are a blur and some I remember too vividly as they continue to reoccur in my mind. I particularly recall a day in early January, when my sister and I were sat in a small side room in the hospice, listening to the doctor telling us that our mum had only a few weeks to live. She looked gently and knowingly at us and spoke of Anticipatory Grief; the feelings of grief that can happen before you actually lose someone. It was a new term for me. I looked it up. I hadn’t thought of grief occurring before a loved one died.
Anticipatory grief is described as a roller coaster; some emotions are similar to conventional grief and others are more associated with seeing how your loved one is changing, the constant rising and diminishing sense of hope and being forced to imagine life without them, even though they are still there. It helped to explain my feelings:
Helplessness. Sadness. Panic. Fear. Have I said/done enough? Giving space for her emotions. Waiting for the inevitable. Having to give up hope. Guilt. Anger and frustration. Wanting it to slow down (so we’d have longer together). Wanting it to speed up (to reduce her suffering). Exhaustion.
Just typing these words and reflecting on what it meant during that time feels draining – it was a traumatic experience.
My sister and I clung on to each other, sharing the load, grateful for the care she was receiving and for the support we had from our partners, but looking back I wonder, how did we cope?
We spent as much time as possible with her, but the rest of life didn’t just go away and it was a constant juggle of priorities (my clients were so kind and understanding when I needed to reschedule our meetings). It had already been a tough year, and I was also supporting my twins as they started their bumpy ride into the tumultuous life of secondary school. Everyone’s emotional health took a battering.
As the anticipatory phase of grief passed, we were pushed into a new phase; life without our mum. I know I am lucky to have had her for as long as I did, but she was only 78, which these days doesn’t seem that old and she wasn’t ready.
Most of us will face grief at some point, it’s part of loving others, and it’s well known that we all experience it in our own way – even my sister and I found this to be the case. For me, the acute all-consuming pain of those early weeks gradually evolved into a more dull but constant ache, the type that wears you out even when you do nothing. The loss is always there and sometimes if I’m awake at night or feeling at a low ebb, it envelopes me and holds me down.
More recently, I have found my emotions sort of co-exist with each other, but it’s not linear and some days are better than others. I feel a core sense of contained sadness and of missing her, which is sometimes punctuated by a sharp and overwhelming spike of emotion. I guess it may always be like that. But there is also warmth, happiness and laughter, and with the benefit of time and the support of family and friends, I do (as my mum would have predicted) cope.