It Hurts, And It Goes On Hurting

I honestly don't know where and how to even begin.

It took me a good 20 minutes or so before I could type the next words and even then, I am struggling to finish my sentence. I could not help but burst into uncontrollable tears. It's 2:30 early in the morning and I know I should be sleeping at this time but since I came back to the US after my mom's funeral, I have not been sleeping the way I should be and my body clock has just been having a hard time adjusting to my local time. I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much I went through our photos and reminisce my memories of her.

Cancer is brutal. It takes away so much of what is the essence of our parents and what we journey with until death is someone who is beloved, yet not known. Someone who cannot be the loved one they once were. It's a cruel illness that nobody ever deserves to suffer from. It is cruel to the person who endures immense pain and has to go through the roller coaster of emotions facing the fact that they are dying. That they are leaving this world, leaving their families, still doing their best to keep a brave face for their loved ones. Still wanting to fight for their life; and cruel to the family who have to watch them die.

If cancer had a face, I imagine a target at the shooting range and I would love to pull the trigger of my gun and shoot it constantly and aggressively until that target is blown and torn up into pieces. If only it were that easy! I would have done it over and over the very first time we found out my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 nasopharyngeal cancer 4 years ago. It was the most devastating news we all have heard. I always thought these kind of things only happen to other people. Not to us. Not to my mother. I vaguely remember that day when we were all in a video call, my mom, my dad, my brother and sister...when my mom broke the sad news. I could see the hurt as well as the fear in her eyes. Something that I would never forget. How could anybody accept something like that? How would I possibly react to everything if it was me? I could not imagine. I was in shock and the same fear came over me. What happens next? What will happen to my mom?

I bvelieve that was the first day we all started grieving.

The grief before death, is a grief that children of parents with any type of cancer disease experience. With no time line for either the disease or the emotions. This disease, depending on what type of cancer, progresses fast and the loss will pile up greatly without knowing when death will come. And that for me, is the hardest part. It's grief, on top of grief before a loved one dies. Before a mother dies.

They say it makes it easier to know in advance that someone is going to die, to have time to prepare for the inevitable. But it does not. Four years passed from when we learned that my mother was terminally ill and that we should prepare for what was coming. However, time passed and she grew stronger. She started chemotherapy and yes, that was tough on her and that there was a time she had to give up the sessions because her poor body could just not take it anymore. She fought for us. She fought for herself. She fought for more time.

In recent months as she changed and transitioned from walking out to us to being brought out in a wheelchair, she still had that hopeful look in her eyes that everything would be okay. We would encourage her to keep fighting. To stick to her healthcare plan and what the doctors ordered. We all did our prt and our best given the fact that we were mostly away from each other. But we kept in touch. We saw to it that she felt that she was being taken cared of and that we are all here for her.

Loss is painful, whatever age. My mom was 59. She was still young. She still had so much years in her life if it wasn't for the sneaky, unfair and brutal effects of being sick with cancer. It felt like we were all robbed of so many wonderful opportunities and years that we all could have made with her, and her with us.

I am still young. I would have had so many years I could have spent with her. We could have done so many wonderful things together. Travel together. Have fun together. Life is unfair when I think about it that way.

But I learned in such a short time that age doesn't really play any part in grief. It hurts unbearable whatever your own age may be or the age of the one you have lost. It's the loss that nearly destroys you. You'll never get used to it. But this is the new normal and you have to build anew without that person in your life.

Today marks the first month since my mom passed away of nasopharyngeal cancer at the young age of 59. Everything is still fresh. Every emotion still raw. It hurts, and it goes on hurting. The pain of losing her and going through everything my family went through days before she died was and is still agonizing, harrowing, much less painful. It's even more painful to realize that whatever I do, there is nothing in this world that will help me bring her back. I will have to live with the pain. Deal with the loss. And hopefully in time, things will be much more easier.

Most people have some vague understanding of the 5 stages of grief, ( denial, anger, bargaining,depression and acceptance ), often played out in books or movies as a template we must all go through, the Kubler-Ross Model. But after some reading, the often referred to stages were originally intended for the person who was terminally ill and was intended to help them come to terms with their own impending death.

Nothing ever prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die, never prepared me. Truth is, we are all going to be different for the rest of our lives. The ideas of happiness we have, the expectations we have all set, the troubles and worries we feel are going to shift,have begun to shift. What is important and what is not will change. We are all grappling with the idea of mortality more than we ever have before.

We lost our mother and I suppose, if it is any consolation at all that we were all by her side and she was in the commfort of her own bed, her own home when she passed. I remember holding her small frame around me, my hand holding hers as she was slowly drifting away...it was the saddest, most heartbreaking thing I have ever experienced in my entire existence. It still is. I don't ever want to relive that moment. It was agonizing and excruciating. Compounded by the fact that days before she passed was stressful and traumatic to her as well us to all of us.

There are not sufficient words to embody the heartbreak of losing your mother. The knowledge that though she was far, she was somewhere we could reach her, is now gone. It is selfish for us to have wanted her a bit longer, knowing she was in pain, but humans are selfish. And that would make me selfish in that sense. It is difficult to let go of those we love. We have lost our mother, and so we have lost the future we imagined.

Time passes and it gets easier than it was that first week. Sometimes it's harder because that short period following a death is expected. People give you space, but once that window has passed, it's almost as though we are hiding a secret we can't show the world. This grieving is still going on, coming in and going regularly. It feels strange to have fun some days, like we are doing a disservice to our mother, to truly enjoy ourselves has a hint of wrong to it. Everything seems so trivial even though a part of me knows it's not. All I can ever do now is move on and look forward to better days. And I would like to think that doing better in all aspects of my life and being a good sister to my siblings and a good daughter to my father would honor and celebrate my mother.

She will never be forgotten. Her memory will live on forever in our hearts and yes, it hurts and it goes on hurting. But I will learn to live with it.

XOXO,

Karen