madolescence
As I move into the last season of my mother’s life, I am reminded of the article I wrote in 2019, when I was existing in the middle of a burst of cumulative grief that began with the death of my dad in 2017.
Cumulative grief is the ongoing grief a person experiences when several deaths happen all at once, giving a person little or no time to process each loss individually.
I began this journey in 2017. I have since lost two dads, a grandmother, my 40 year old beautiful cousin and best friend to brain cancer, my German Shepherd Oscar, my rescue cat Ditty, who was eaten by a coyote in 2020 and most recently, I lost my sweet Popeye AKA Mr. Handsome, a Shar Pei mix who adopted me right before I had my son in 2008. Currently my mother, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2012 and Alzheimer’s in June 2022, is in the brutal last stages of the disease.
Watching someone you love fade away in slow motion over 13 years is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life. It has changed my stardust at a cellular level.
Silly me, thought I had already mastered that level in 2021, when I watched my dad, who also had Alzheimer’s, die an excruciatingly painful death from COVID. He unfortunately got stuck in the geriatric psych ward as a result of the March 2020 lockdown and was never able to return home.
“But, wait! There’s more,” the universe said quietly, as she slowly began pulling the light that has always guided me from my mother’s crystal clear, blue eyes.
Who am I without my mother’s love?
——
Disentangling
Do you ever feel like if one strand of the universe bends the wrong way, you will simply break into a million pieces and become lost in the gray static of your own life?
In the past year, I have separated from my husband of eleven years and my stepdad, once a virile marathon runner and gifted surgeon, passed away after a brutal fight with cancer. My mother, my ROCK and strongest supporter, suffers from progressive short-term memory loss. Not long ago, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after being found in his car disoriented, his car broken down at a rest stop in Tuscaloosa with no ID or idea as to how he got there. The bright spot of my summer was a life without parole sentence for the woman who brutally murdered and dismembered a close friend of mine 22 years ago.
My heart is broken into so many pieces that I don’t even know where I begin to put it back together. I suspect that it won’t ever be the same again. I am numb. I cannot cry. I am becoming undone.
I wonder if losing so much at once is a good thing. I feel naked and undefined, my edges blurred, floating through this last year completely outside of my true self. I am exhausted from trying to act stronger than I feel. Sometimes, when I am alone and it quiet, the emotion, loss and grief rock my body like a giant wave and just like that, I am drowning and unable to stand it any longer. I crumble, falling deep, deep, deeper into the abyss with no safety net. My spirit is lonely and the pain is palpable.
“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.” -Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Grief and loss are wicked, curvy roads with no clear end, their hidden trails and pathways leading me to parts of myself I didn’t even know existed. I stand in the middle, dazed and in limbo, grasping for moments of clarity that some days simply.don’t.come. When clarity does speak, she says, “You will get through this. You will be okay. This is all temporary.” Disentangling, I try to listen.
I read somewhere that hope is the only thing stronger than fear. I don’t know hope anymore. Like Alice, I’ve been going through life with blinders on, it’s tough to see. I fear that one night, hope will sneak into my heart and smash it to pieces. I won’t run from it again.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the last half of this year has definitely been about slow, agonizing change.
"Baby breakdown.
Go ahead and give it to me
Breakdown
Honey take me to the knife
Breakdown
Now I'm standing here can't you see
Breakdown is alright
It's alright
It's alright..."
Tom Petty, Breakdown.
My need to lean into the chaos and pain by far outweighs the need to run from it. That’s a good thing. I need to feel it. I want it to bring me to my knees. I have licked my wounds and protected my scars for long enough. I believed my strength defined my pain, but I now realize that it only impeded my growth. I long to be comfortable in the quiet of my own skin, darkness and all. My vulnerability is raw, bruised and uncomfortable. I am totally breaking down, I am coming undone or perhaps just finally becoming Yes, becoming. I like the sound of that.
Little by little, my broken pieces are pulling back towards each other, finding comfort in the lightness of their cracks instead of pushing each other away. My challenge awaits and my struggle will make me stronger. Deep breaths. LOTS of deep breaths. I channel Joan of Arc: I am not afraid. I was born to do this.