My whole life lived in perpetual fear of this moment, and now it's here...

[QuantumZ00]

Since I was a little boy, I've battled with tremendous anxiety and depression. They've always swirled in me like a typhoon, threatening to ruin any decent thing.  

I've always suffered from an overabundance of empathy; everything affects me deeply emotionally. I cannot watch suffering people on the news without crying, for example. But much of my anxiety has always stemmed from a fear that I would lose my mom, dad, sister or brother. I've been in therapy for years, and this is a topic that frequently dominates discussions. There's no hiding how much this thought terrified me.

My mom has been sick with various issues my whole life. She has had kidney failure,  heart failure, lupus, mixed connective tissue disease. The list goes on and on. And every time she was close to death, she somehow defied the odds. But she has gotten steadily sicker.  We just thought she'd always beat the odds.

In 2022, my brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed January 20. By February 23, he was dead. The sheer brutality of the affair shocked us all. I had long conversations with my parents about my fears after this. I urged them to retire NOW, not to wait. I felt they were running out of time. They had been married 45 years. What's a few more years of work to ensure true financial security? 

I begged them to reconsider, but they would not.

On November 5, 2024, my mom went to the e.r. after her primary said she should go after she reported some symptoms to him. Within hours, we got the dreaded news: my mom has stage four pancreatic cancer, the exact same type that killed my brother. 

When her primary doctor was told this, he was shocked. Pancreatic cancer is NOT genetic, so this outcome is extremely rare. And the strange thing was, he remembered, was that my mom once told him after my brother passed that she felt she needed to die the same way he did, to experience the agony he went through. "It's only what I deserve," she said.

The thing you need to understand about my mother is that she is the closest thing I can imagine to a real, living saint. Everybody who has ever had good parents thinks their mom is the bomb, but my mom was simply extraordinary. 

As a child, my mom suffered the most depraved, animalistic abuse imaginable from the hands of her mother and a parade of evil step fathers. My mom therefore acted as surrogate mother for all six of her siblings by the age of nine. In between receiving hideous beatings and enduring more sinister things from her step fathers, she changed diapers, made sure her brothers and sisters did their homework and somehow scavenged enough together to eat for the night.

You would think a person who endured this would be a mess, and believe me my mother hid her inner emotional turmoil well. She didnt engage with therapy until she hit 60, when even she acknowledged she really needed it.

But instead what happened was my mom transformed, butterfly-like, into the world's most impressive super mom. As soon as she had her first child, she knew her purpose in the world. And every day, carpe diem, she made sure we knew she loved us, but that she expected things of us because she taught us right from wrong. We were to honor their name by showing the world we were worthy of it by our actions.

My mother was the single most moral and ethical woman I've ever met, and it's not even close. Without exaggeration I can genuinely say I've never seen her lie, never seen her made a decision in anger, never seen her take action for malicious purposes. I've never seen her hold a grudge, never met a person she wasn't willing to forgive if they show they have changed.

Long nights did I witness her shuffling around money she did not have to try to help out a friend or family member she felt needed it more than she did.  For a decade she wore the same three outfits because she wanted to make sure me and my brothers and sisters always had the clothes we needed for the new school year. 

My mom helped me defeat a ten year heroin habit, helped me turn my life around from felon to success. Every day of my life I wanted to be more like her, to show I was worthy of the extraordinary love she always showed me. She has always been my heroine. And now in two weeks since her diagnosis, she can already no longer speak and no longer recognizes anyone who enters the room. The scale of the tragedy is so enormous I don't know how to exist right now.

Everything tasted like ash. Nothing provides joy. The strangest coincidence of all is that two months prior to learning about her cancer, my crippling depression of forty years simply vanished into thin air. My mom got to see her son without depression for two whole months before this happened, and the fact I wasn't depressed entering this tragedy has meant I've been coping better than I thought. But I am pervaded by sorrow right now, and it's threatening to return me to my severe depression.

I try to remember the blessings. I got to say goodby and I love you before she lost coherence. That I had been taking care of her the last two years of her life due to other illnesses, and so got to spend a lot of time with her at the end. That I have over 48 hours of voice recordings of mom explaining why she made every choice she did in her harrowing life and ours. How many kids get to say they have such a treasure? It's hanging around my neck in a USB shaped like a key.

But still it doesn't seem enough. It never seems like I can take enough or her with me.

The day after her death diagnosis, I wrote her a beautiful essay about how much she meant to me. Then I sang her in my raspy voice "Death Cab For Cutie's: I'll Follow You Into The Dark." We embraced and said we love each other. My last vision of this wonder woman that once roamed this planet,my wonderful, brilliant, empathetic, intelligent, kind and loyal mother... One of the greatest who has ever lived.

 

 

[QuantumZ00]

She passed today at 2:24pm. I don't know how I'm gonna survive this

[Silver K]

I'm sorry for the loss of your mom and also your brother.  I lost my mother of cancer in 2011.  It changed me but I survived. The first week after she died I couldn't understand why the world just kept turning when the person that meant the world to me was gone. 

I can still remember her voice but at times it seems distant, somehow. The key you wear around your neck is a very nice idea. Please be kind to yourself and allow yourself to grieve. Cherish the memories. "Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."