Dester

I believe there is something to being open with the heart and forgetting about your mind with issues like this......it is like faith. When I am open with my heart I am able to "see" so many more things that bring love and meaniing into my life. For example, during mom's burial there was a huge black and yellow butterfly that lit on her urn for such a long time and then fluttered away....it was so lovely and spiritual. Just now, as I was writing this I saw that same kind of butterfly outside my window....it brought such joy to my heart and I feel connected to my mother. The interesting thing is that no one else at the funeral saw the butterfly except my aunt, who has macular degeneration so bad she is legally blind...............go figure. It so seemed like a message and I chose to take it that way. I like to remain open to miracles because that's the only way I'll be ready to see them...with an open heart.

Dear JLC, I know what you are say is true....I knew it before my mother was dying and then when I watched her in the process of dying I knew it for sure. My mother was a stoic person who did not lean toward the dramatic. She did not play around, not did she make things up...she was very pain and simple and serious. She was not a drunk, nor was she unstable in any way. After mom was diagnosed with cancer we were in the doctor's office, this was before they had given her any kind of medication and/or treatment. She was lying there on the table and she said that when she closed her eyes she saw people walking towards her....she saw people, young and old, blond and blue eyed.....one by one they kept coming to her. Mom ket closing her eyes because it was comforting that they kept coming to her. I believe those people were spritits from the other side and they were coming to escort mom and comfort her in her transition. I had so many experiences like like with mom that I am sure that there is "something" on the other side and I am not afraid of my own death at all now. It was so wonderful. It confirmed my belief system and helped me greatly be comforted in her passing. Dester

Thanks for that. Sometimes it's hard to let go and move on because then you have to take on the responsibility of making a new life....it could be easier to stay stuck in one place. Movement and change is the most difficult thing of all. That's what I've found anyway.

Walt, There are those who may not get what I meant when I said "it" was not a good idea.....what I meant was that dying just to join your deceased spouse was not a good idea. And if you were/are contemplating such you need to be communicating with someone other than these boards, like a counselor or your doctor. There are many people who actually commit suicide when a child or spouse dies because they can't cope with the grief. I had a close friend that did that and one that wanted to when her child died. She was convinced that it would be better to "join" her whereever her dead daughter was than go on in the agony she was in. Beautiful poem or not, it looked more like a red flag from my perspective. I suppose there are just as many opinions as there are body parts. My post to you was out of genuine concern for you. My hope for you is that you have more good days than bad days in the coming months. Donna

Walt, That is a moving poem, but is not a good idea. There is hope and there can be happiness and comfort and love again. You may not feel this way right now and may even get angry at the mention, but there may even be another love for you. Your wife would have wanted you to be happy and live out your days contentedly. I once thought that if I couldn't have my husband I would rather not live and in time I have moved way beyond that. I know now that I can live a good life and there is beauty and hope. You will too if you give it enough time. Isolation is your worse enemy right now. When I was in San Diego I went to a Hospice walking group and what a great group of folks it was! They were mostly men and women who had lost their beloved spouses. They walked a few miles every Saturday morning at the bay and helped each other through the difficult times. My hope for you is that you find an outlet and a place to go to share your grief and meet people. Hugs to you Walt, Donna

Walt, I'm sorry you're having a bad one today. Isn't it odd how it comes in waves and at the most unexpected times? Your introspection and courage in the face of your loss will surely hold you up through another day. Thank you for the lovely poem/music. It made my day better. Donna aka Dester

Shakita, I can feel your pain and your loss as I know the loss of a mother, my mother. It is a huge piece of who I am. I am suffering and crying too. But here is the good part that I hope you can hang on to until some of the pain subsides. Your relationship/bond with your mother taught you how to be who you are, therefore you have the opportunity to put your energy into mirroring that for your children. What an enormous gift your mother left for you...to have that inner knowledge to be able to be that same way for your own family. Do that with joy....so many people don't have that. You had a wonderful love and a wonderful gift....cherish that and wonder over it every day. Your mother would want you to do that. Your children deserve the legacy that your mother created....you can give that to them. Love is such a wonderful thing. Your pain is awful and will be for a long time.....you will make it through it....there is no way around grief but to go through it. I wish I had had the love you had with your mother...and yet I still have the pain and grief and love for her. Mothers and daughters share a special bond. Best to you, donna

Dear Maylissa, Forgive me for harping on this, but "justing wanting to fix your mother's life, but not know how to" is still taking on the parent role on an emotional level. I have been going to ALANON over the last few years....I never knew my father was an alcoholic until I was 52 years old. He died when I was 19. I have learned a lot about the family dynamics in an alcoholic family and never even thought abut myself that way until recently. I have a lot more to learn about myself and how it all affected me........the one thing I'm working hardest is forgiveness. My mother and father had those issues because of dyfunctional issues in their lives and childhood and never had the educational and/or savvy to figure it all out.....so they just suffered and remained ill. I have to find a soft place in my heart for them or it only hurts me to go on being bitter. That includes my brother who is an alcoholic.........he inherited that gene from my dad and then went on to be just like him. It is a family disease. I will probably need counseling for the next few years because of all this........ Thank God I can see through it all and know there is another way of being. Sounds like you are in a similar place. Dester

I'm so sorry about your pain and loss. The only pointer I can give is what helped me so much.....I went to Hospice grief groups and indivual counselling. It was in the bereavement groups that I found comfort. I found that my complicated grief wasn't unusual....I heard so many complicated stories of grief. I helped me a lot. You usually don't have to have used that particular Hospice in order to go to the groups.... I hope you find peace. dester

I am in awe of the love and closeness you and Michael shared. I have lived for 55 years and have never had that wonderful experience. I'm almost fearful of having it now, because I don't think I could stand the loss you're feeling. To have had someone that close and that loving is beyond my wildest dreams............to be able to give that kind of tenderness and love to another and have him accept it is beyond my wildest dreams. What a beautilful life you must have had together!!! That kind of spirit and love lives on in many things around you and in you. Dester

Dear Maylissa, You certainly had/have a lot of complicated stuff going on with your grief....with your mom's drinking being an issues and all. That must make it all the more confusing. Plus the role reversal when you were younger because of the drinking. My family had addiction issues too...my dad was an alcoholic and my brother is one. Then there was mom who drank her wine every day, but no more...but couldn't give up those cigarettes. If anyone watched her suffocate like that from lung cancer they would never smoke again. Two of my good friends quit because of hearing about how she died. Mom never tried the patch or hypnosis or any other ways of quitting, although she tried so many times. I hope it gets easier as time passes............but now I miss her every day. We didn't live in the same city, but we talked every other day and for an hour on Saturdays. Mom came and stayed with me for a month each year. There is a special tie between mother and daughter....it is sometimes strained, confusing and tense.....but nonetheless it is very cosmic. I didn't have children so I will not expereince that.........but I know it from my relationship with my mother. I see her in me so often..........I used to reject that and now I embrace it. I loved my mother more than she ever knew.......I told her but she didn't believe it. She thought it was all about the Will and what I was going to get from her, but she underestimated me big time......it was my brother, her favorite, who was doing that. My mother openly played favorites all my life....my brother was her favorite...there were only two of us. Mom made it clear through her words and her actions that my brother was her fav orite boy..........and he took advantage of it. He manipulated mom and got expensive property from her before she died and manipulated her finances so I would get less from her. When mom was in a coma her mouth was permanetly open........my brother took me into the hallway of the hospital and told me he wanted to get the gold crowns out of her mouth before the funeral parlor people got them. He wanted to know if I wanted 1/2 of them. I was so aghast that I couldn't speak, I just told him that he had sunk to the lowest depths of any human I'd ever known and I couldn't talk to him any longer. That was my brother and I don't speak to him or his wife who is just as bad....they tried to get all they could in the end. My mother would have been surprised how her favorite really was in the end................. I was so distraught over my mother's death and then having to deal with my evil brother that it has taken me a year to recover from it.....and I'm still not OK. I wonder if it is about alcoholism or just being evil and greedy............ I won't go into how they treated my mother when she was alive....they supposedly were the ones to take care of her house. But they let it run down so it would value less in the estate...they wanted to buy it. So they let mom live in a run down house because of their greed. It also had mice infestation in the kitchen....and she had given them an expensive lot next door so they would take care of her...........I hope God was watching this. Obviously I haven't let go of this yet.................

Maylissa, You and I could have been the same person having the same relationship with our moms, or wishing we'd had more, and feeling lost and empty. I'm 54 years old and lost my mom 14 months ago. I read your posts and feel like I know you and know the struggles......I'm having them too. I wonder if I'll ever get over wanting my mom back...can I ever let her go? I guess it's all the unfinished business...all the time I wanted to spend with her that got taken away. My move was just to be closer to mom. She turned 83 in June and I figured if I wanted to have time with her I’d better make the move soon.I had one of those gut feelings that only daughters and mothers have that something was amiss and I had to go and I had to go in a hurry. Instead of the usual weekend visit, I made it for seven days. For what? I couldn’t say yet, but when I have those eerie feelings I am, unfortunately, 99.9% right that something is wrong. Mom was so small. She told me it was because she had had a chest cold and it just wouldn’t go away. I could tell she was sick because her watch and turquoise bracelet were loose on her wrist and her clothes looked too big. She told me it was because they, my brother and sister-in-law and mom, went to a baseball game and she got chilled after having the flu and she just couldn’t shake it. Also, she had that “look”…….the look when a person’s skin is grayish and their eyes become bigger and softer because they’re between worlds. Mom and I had big plans. I would move closer and we would be together for dinners out at our favorite restaurants and go for walks and play Cribbage. Mom loves to walk….she walks 4 miles every morning at 7:30, up hill no less!! And, there’s that glass of cheap wine promptly at 5pm. It used to be a Martini for the longest time and I can’t remember when it changed to that wine. Mom could afford the best, but her depression era mentality made her buy Carlo Rossi by the jug. She was always so healthy because she was disciplined: disciplined about everything except the cigarettes. It must have been all that exercise, ocean air, cheap wine and her vegetable garden. She ate only vegetables in the summer and wouldn’t visit me if it was planting time. We went for our first walk...... normally I can’t keep up with her on our walks, but this time mom had to stop and sit down five times, then we cut it short. I said, “Mom, you’d better see the doctor.” It’s just that darned cold I had!” She said without looking up. I lied to comfort her, “ You probably have walking pneumonia.” I knew instinctively from that tiny body and grayish coloring there was something terrible going on. Mom loved her Winston’s…… Winston Lights later on as if that helped. She smoked for 65 years and tried to stop a few times. I can remember the smog-like layers of smoke in our living room while watching Father Knows Best because both mom and dad smoked like locomotives. For fun I’d stick my finger up into a layer to break it……….. I gave mom until 2pm the next day to make an appointment with her doctor……I’m the only one who can talk to her that way and get away with it. The next morning at 6:30 mom woke me, “Please get up and take me to the doctor so I can be there when they open.” There was fear in her eyes. “I can’t breathe and I have so much pressure!” She either finally had permission to feel what she had already been feeling or she’d been waiting or me to come to begin the process. Mom’s regular doctor was out, so she had some young guy, young enough to be my son, who was so uncomfortable and nervous that he made us nervous. He came back in with the x-rays and said without hesitation or emotion to my tiny mother, “ You have lung cancer and it’s inoperable.” I thought how the hell could he know that? We haven’t even seen an oncologist yet! She looked straight at him stoic as can be and then me, “ I expected this some day” All mom's feelings were pent up inside just as they had been her entire life………I’ve never seen her express herself freely. Stiff and stoic. Always accusing me of “wearing my feelings on my sleeve” as if that was some kind of weakness. And there I was sobbing in that room with my feelings on my sleeve for God and everyone else to see. I drove home trying not to cry as tears slid out the edges of my eyes, trying to hide my feelings, and mom just kept saying, “I’ve had a long and good life Donna, don’t worry about it.” She looked at me as if I were an idiot for being emotional. Maybe it was fear…I have to believe it was fear that drove her words. I told her I was so sorry that this was happening to her……and she’d say, “What do you expect?” I had been gone from home for 30 years, but it was my place to stay. I could just hear mom now, “That’s a good job. You just go back to Arizona and start work and I’ll deal with this. Your brother and his wife will take care of me. That’s why I gave them that property next door.” When I popped the question, do you want me to stay and take care of you……you could have read the shock on my face. Mom said softly, “Yes, Donna I want you to stay here with me.” “Well,” I said,” I would’ve stayed no matter what you said” I can still talk to her that way……… And so we began the journey. To this day I’m not sure if mom asked me to stay to care for her to punish me for being gone all those years or because she knew I could handle the situation or because she truly wanted me there. She didn’t allow the people she loved the most to see her during the last weeks, only me, her sister and occasionally her son and daughter-in-law. Mom said she didn’t want those people to have to see her that way. Whatever the reason I gave her unconditional love until the end, something mom was never able to give to me. With that I believe there was a healing of sorts for both of us. I miss all the time lost. I appreciate all the times we said "I love you" before mom died. I'm glad we had wonderful trips together all around the world many years before......but I wasn't finished with her yet. I still needed more. I still need more of my mom.

I listened to the attached song. What a wonderful tribute. I could feel your loss and knowledge that your wife had to stop suffering and go. I wish strength and courage for you. Donna

The bad part of losing our moms is that we don't have that wonderful maternal place to go any longer...... I miss my mother more than I can express in words. The good part is that I keep seeing parts of her manifesting itself in me..........her sayings, her mannerisms, her beliefs and so much more. I commit myself to feeling proud and comforted that I am part of her and she is part of me always. It took me a year to get to this place...I hope you can feel that too.

I'm so glad to hear that some people don't think it's crazy to have that experience of smelling my mother's cigarette smoke. There are other signs of her too that are simply so MOM......like the hummingbird that flew into the kitcken a few days after she passed....I knew it was mom in spirit. There was no way a hummingbird would ever get close to mom's kitchen...there are no flowers there and there was a deep patio. It was very cosmic. And also at her funeral....a huge black and yellow butterfly came and sat for the longest time on the urn and then flew off. And the bird that tried to frantically to get in the french door window...it just kep trying and trying with it's wings beating against the glass. I think it was mom letting me know she was OK or she is still here on some other plane and I will see her again. There were so many signs....I do believe one has to have your eyes and heart open at all times to see them. I've always been a person who looked for sings and so was mom....we had that in common. I miss her so much, I so regret that we didn't have more time together.