It has been almost 4 months since I lost my mother to stage 4 metastatic lobular carcinoma of the breast. I am 26, newly married, and I was ready to start a family of my own, but the experience of losing my mother was so traumatic I haven't been able to even start moving forward. I feel like I'm going crazy. I haven't gotten quite used to the fact that she's not here. I still have to put thought in to remembering the day that she passed to remind myself that she's gone.
My mother didn't even make it 9 months after her diagnoses. The shock of losing her sooner than I anticipated weighs heavy on my heart. We had so many plans for the near future. I wasn't ready to let go. The signs were there, but she never wanted talk about it. She had dialysis 3 times a week and the chemotherapy treatments were getting closer together and more aggressive. Then the chemo came to a halt. Her body just couldn't take it anymore.
I had her admitted to the hospital the Thursday before she passed. She was beginning to sleep even more, couldn't carry on a conversation and was too lucid to understand what was going on. I rushed home to her in the emergency room. I had a friend of hers take her in while I could get her away from her boyfriend who had been verbally abusive and neglecting her more and more as she got sicker.
The night she passed was probably the most unexpected. We had come to the conclusion that hospice was the next step. After waiting all day that day for a doctor to come visit it wasn't until about 845pm that someone showed. After about a half hour conversation we piled out of the room for the nurses to hook her back back up to an IV drip of fluids and within a couple minutes she called us back in because it was her time.
After a few minutes and then her last breath I ran out of the room to cry. I couldn't look at her laying there lifeless. It was something I had never before seen in my life. To look at the woman who carried me for 9 months, who rocked me to sleep as a child and shared many laughed with as I got older, it was hard to come to terms with.
I feel a lot of resentment for the times we didn't speak. It wasn't until about a couple months before she found out she was sick that we started speaking again. Throughout my early 20s she had lied so much to me that it was hard to have a relationship. Never could I have ever anticipated that she was going to die in order to prevent the things that I now regret. I know we were in a better place when she passed.
I haven't been able to move on from not being there more while she was sick. I hope she knows how much I loved her. I wonder if she knows I did everything I could to make her last days easier on her. We didn't have the best relationship, but when she needed me I was there, no questions asked. I think about her every day, I wake up dreaming about her and a lot of the things that I do remind me of the times we spent together.
A lot of people say they receive signs from loved ones who have passed. I am not sure if that happens or things that happen often are just a coincidence. I can't say I have had this experience, but I do see a lot of things that remind me of her that are things that we had in common. Maybe this is how I learn to move forward; keeping her memory alive in things that we shared.