Hello fellow club members. I lost my mum in 2015. I was 35 and it was a couple of weeks til my 36 th birthday. She had a short battle with cancer and like a poster further up the thread, she had been explicitly told she was going to survive. I believe it was the chemotherapy that sped up the process of her deterioration.
Mum wanted to stop it and my older siblings wouldn't allow her to express and accept her expiration. Toxic positivity meant she was made to feel as though she was quitting when she spoke of stopping chemo. She would cry to me in private saying she knew she was leaving and had accepted it. My older siblings were the ones that couldn't. This situation really hampered my grief. I was so devastatingly angry. I love my siblings but their cowardice ruined what could be have been a calmer and more comfortable few months. Mum was my dad's carer. He was in refractory multiple myeloma having lived with it for about 13 years. Mum didn't have a peaceful end. An incompetent Mc Millan nurse failed to show up to give mum morphine. My beautiful mum spent a treacherous few hours in pain til a friend of the family who is a district nurse risked her licence and obtained morphine from somewhere and administered it herself. I suffered horrendous ptsd from watching the struggle mum had the last few hours.
My dad who was quite simply an example of "Father in Perfection" finally succumbed to the myeloma in 2019.
He was conscious right up to the last few hours. He had requested to pass in the hospice as he saw how exhausting and terrifying it had been for us 7 grown kids when mum was actively dying. Everyone of mums kids were by her side to witness her experience. An experience mum feared her whole life, dying in horrendous discomfort. Dad wanted us not to have to go through anything again that may result in more trauma.
I never left any of their sides, I didn't dare close my eyes incase they slipped away and I wasn't present. Even though mums end wasn't pleasant, I don't regret being there. She was the sacred vessel by which I came into this world. She was like a "TV mum". Perfect. I always knew how lucky I was to have the parents I had. They were the couple everyone envied. Their marriage was solid and they still fancied each other in their twilight years through insidious illness.
I have to say, I do not cry or fret anymore. I am in a place where I feel nothing but gratitude for the wealth I had of their love and guidance. I feel no need to even visit their graves. They aren't there. They live forever in my memory. I dream about them all the time and I never wake up sad as I feel as though I've just saw them.
This is tldr. I guess I'm sharing the wisdom and hope to others in the club that there is a place grief can evolve into and it's not a painful place. I talk about my folks every day. I laugh when I remember the jokes we all shared, the songs we sang, stories at bedtime, cringing when remembering how they would dance randomly in the living room and dad would steal a kiss. Even mums nagging at dad sometimes, it's funny cos she always knew she was no 1 in his world as he was hers.
Griefs timeline is non existent. One must tread their own path for however long it takes and never allow anyone to make you feel as though "it's time to move on". You move in grief at your own pace. It's not a competition.
They are alot to live up to and I feel fortunate I'm literally walking proof that they were here and I strive every day to honour all the things they taught me. I am still realising lessons they gave that I didn't even know were lessons.
To paraphrase Rafiki -"they live in us".
Keep heart fellow club members
I'm visiting dad this weekend and agreed to go with him to church. It was full-on mothering Sunday, which was hard going.
but I can't help but feel a failure.