A Mother Loved, A Mother Lost

Warning: This blog might be hard for many people to read, especially if you recently lost a loved one. Please read with caution.

“Mom? Mom. MOM.” It was 11 am on Feb 4th, 2018. I was up a couple of hours earlier when I first saw her sleeping on the couch. But it was Sunday and I wanted to sleep longer. So, I closed my bedroom door and laid back down. When I got up the second time to see that she hadn’t moved, I knew something was wrong. She never sleeps in this late. As I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, I could feel my mind leave as my body took over. A voice inside of me spoke up. “Mom”. I took a step forward. “Mom?” Two steps forward. “Mom.” Three steps forward before I found myself standing above her. “MOM”. With my hand on her shoulder as I gently but firmly shake her. “Mom?” As I stand there not breathing, not moving, I wait to hear a voice. A breath. I wait there staring at her chest looking for any sign of breathing. I’ve been here before. Every time her health took a turn for the worst. I’ve been here before. My body knows the drill. Staring at my mother, wondering if she’s breathing. But every time I’d been here, her stomach would eventually move, no matter how long it would take each time. There was always a sign of life. But this time, nothing was moving. Even time felt like it had stopped. “mom”. This time you can hear the defeat in my voice. It’s like my body finally caught up to what my mind already knew. I grabbed my phone in protocol and dialed the paramedics. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” “I think my mom is … dead”. “Is she breathing?” “I don’t think so”. I pulled her off of the couch and on to the floor to start chest compressions. As I took instructions over the phone to try to bring her back to this world, my mind came back to my body and fear showed up. I started pushing down, 1-2-3-4. My eyes filled up with tears and I could no longer see. 1-2-3-4. I was stuck in this up and down motion with my hands to her chest. 1-2-3-4. Am I pressing down hard enough? 1-2-3-4. She’s not dead. I’m overreacting. 1-2-3-4. She’s going to be fine. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. I don’t know how many times I repeated that over the phone with the dispatcher before I noticed figures walking through the front door. But I didn’t stop until someone with a loud voice told me to step away. I was on my knees on the floor, so I sat back and wiped my face for the first time. I remember a paramedic saying her body was still warm. There was hope. For a second there was hope.

For a lot of us, losing our parents is the worst kind of pain we can ever imagine. And maybe it’s not necessarily our parents but the people in our life who we love the most. We can’t imagine how we would be able carry on without them. For me, that person was my mother. I lost my father at such a young age that it’s hard for me to remember him. But my mother lived to be someone who is impossible to forget. She took up so much space in my life that I knew that when the day would come, it would leave a gaping hole in my heart forever. But we know it’s coming, right? Death. We just don’t like to talk about it. It makes us uncomfortable. It’s something that happens far, far away from now and for other people, not for us. Until it does come knocking on our loved one’s door. And if you’re like me, who had a parent that struggled with their health, that knock comes as a warning, and it goes. It comes back, and it goes again. The final knocking can come any day. The reality of death feels much more present to us. But the fact of the matter is, it’s just as real for anyone. An accident can happen at any moment. The news of health complications is as soon as your next doctor visit. We never know when someone’s time is up. It’s a scary reality. But the more we welcome the awareness of that reality, instead of hiding from it, the better we are, for when the time does come.

Knowing that death will come for us all, we can’t help but wonder, is it something we can prepare for? My answer to that is, yes and no. You cannot shield yourself from the loss, but I believe you can mitigate the damage. By asking yourself every day, “if today was this person’s last day, what sort of regret would I have”? Would you have wished that you told them you loved them? For me and my mom, we never left the house, hung up the phone, ended an argument or went to bed without saying “I love you”. I also made sure that my actions, lined up with my words the best that I could. So, when it was her time to go, I didn’t have to think twice about whether she knew that I loved her or not. I knew she did. Would you have wished that you apologized for something you did or said? For me, I made sure that no matter what argument we got into, no matter who was at fault, that I would own up to any of my wrong doings. Nothing was ever that serious that I couldn’t let go, clear the air, and move on. Our relationship was always more important than any blow to my ego. Would you wish you had more time? Would you wish you had more conversations? By asking these sorts of questions now, you get to change the trajectory of your future, by changing how you treat your loved ones while they’re still here. Make more memories. Be more present. Have more conversations. Ask all the questions. Write them down and record them. You’d be surprised at how many questions you come up with when you can no longer ask them. And lastly, take more pictures. They are all that you have left long after your loved ones are gone. Don’t take for granted the time you still have. You want to be able to look back and be proud in knowing you really did do the best you could, with what you had, in the time you were given.

Grief is different for everyone. We cry. We get angry. We feel confused. We fall into denial. We feel a sense of relief if the person was suffering. We get emotional. We lack emotion. We withdraw from our loved ones. We draw closer to them. We change for the better. We change for the worse. We question God, or our behavior becomes questionable. We do some of it, or we do all of it. It comes all at once, it comes in pieces, or it hits you later on. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to experience grief. Losing a loved one can be the hardest thing to live through. For me, my mother was there since day one, it was hard to imagine the rest of my days without her. She filled a role that no one can ever replace and losing her left a space that would be forever vacant. But she was sick most of my life, so that conversation was one that I had with myself plenty of times. “I just don’t know what I’d do if I lost her. I don’t know what kind of person I would become if I had to endure that kind of pain”. I imagined that it would hit me like a huge wave, crashing all at once and I would drown under the weight of the water. Instead, the pain came slowly and quietly. It came through the stillness of the home, after I returned from the hospital. The pain was the sound of her last cup of coffee being poured down the sink as I cleaned up. It came through the scent of her belongings. It was the slow realization, that she will never be back. It spoke the words “Now what?”. The pain didn’t feel like a weight crashing on top of me, it was more like the pain of something being ripped out of me. Out of my core. It would come, knocking me to my knees. And it would go, giving me the strength to stand up again. Mourning isn’t a onetime event, it’s a lifelong process. It pops up weeks, months, years down the road, at any random moment. It pops up during challenging times, when you realize you’re not going into a fight with backup, you’re going into it alone. It pops up during important events, like birthdays and holidays. It’s like a cold space of air, that reminds you that something, or rather someone, is missing.

Just like with grief, we all find comfort in our own ways. Through faith in God’s plans, through the belief that their spirit lives on, that we will one day see them again, or in the simple comfort of knowing that wherever they ended up, it has to be better than this insane world. For me, I found comfort in knowing she was no longer suffering in her body. That she believed in God with all her heart, so if there’s a place called heaven, she’ll be there, waiting for me. I also believe that we don’t fully lose people. We lose them only in their physical form. Our loved ones make impressions on us, they help shape us. Their spirit lives on through us. My mother and I didn’t spend all that time together, for me to ever be able to erase her. She is a part of me. When I don’t know how I’ll get through something difficult, it’s her strength that I muster up. When I go out of my way to help someone, that’s through my mother’s heart. When I get to know people, before judging them, that’s my mother’s teachings. When I manage to grow a tomato plant to the ceiling of my apartment, that’s my mother’s green thumb. And when I forget that she’s living on through me, I make sure I find ways to honor her. I buy her favorite flowers; I go through old photos; I make decisions that she’d be proud of. I make sure I find ways to keep her memory alive by talking about her. The new people in my life might not be able to ever meet her, but it doesn’t mean they’ll never be able to know her. And when I’m missing her, I make sure to take the time to talk to God and imagine what her response would be. She’s not here in the physical moment, but I’ve known her long enough to know what she’d say about the current events of my life. In these ways, we get to stay connected to our loved ones long after they’re gone. In these ways, we get to still grow with them. And it’s how we get to say the things we wish we said when they were still here.

Experiencing the loss of a loved one, changes your experience of life. It puts into perspective the time that we have here on Earth. We have this idea that we have all the time in the world. Death shows us that we do not. The day my mother died, was the day I decided to live. I decided that life is too short to not live out my dreams. It is too short for arguing and fighting or to spend it with people who don’t make me feel good. It is too short to live anywhere I didn’t want to live or continue being someone I didn’t want to be. I also decided that my mother’s death would not be in vain. That I would seek happiness and fulfillment until I drowned in it. That I would find ways to contribute to the world around me. And I would find ways to be a better human being. I decided I would live a better life for her.