Grieving

      Something that I’ve learned recently is that when somebody very close to you passes away, the process of grieving that we human go through never really goes away and it can come back at any moment and smack you down hard.

 

     On July 24th 2008, the day after my 23rd birthday, my dad was diagnosed with ‘Small Cell Lung Cancer’ and it was devastating to my family.  He’d had a pain in his shoulder and when he had  gone to the doctors they suspected pneumonia.  With the confirmation of cancer, he was told they could not cure it but could prolong his life with chemotherapy which in my opinion made him much worse very quickly.

One month later in August, my mother received the crippling news that she too had lung cancer although they had told her that it was nowhere near as bad as my dad’s and that they had caught it very early and would be able to get rid f it.

     Sadly on October 28th 2008 my dad passed away and as anyone can imagine it was soul destroyingly brutal.  We got through though day after day and my mother went for her treatment which didn’t seem to be working.  That Christmas was awful.  I stayed over at my mum’s house for two weeks to help out and i heard her crying herself to sleep every single night.  That’s a hard thing t witness especially when you can’t do anything for her.

In May of 2009, my mother collapsed in agony on the kitchen floor  and was taken t hospital for morphine.  They kept her in because her blood pressure was too low and we expected her home the next day.  Five days later, on May 21st, my mother also passed away, laying in her hospital bed, comatose and holding my hand.

     The grief I felt after the shock and numbness wore off was like nothing I have ever felt before.  I felt crushed and for days I couldn’t speak, I had to pull myself together to take care of my brother and sister.  It was hard and i didn’t think i would make it through to brighter times,  I even attempted suicide because the pressure of taking care of my brother and sister was almost too much to bare.  Fortunately i changed my mind in time to realise That I was being selfish and that it was not just me going through this.

     Looking back and thinking about that time in my life seems so strange to me now, almost as if it had happened to somebody else.  The other day, I was sitting alone in my living room and a memory of my mum, my sister and brother and I decorating the Christmas tree, popped into my head and I realised that we would never do that again.  We’d bug my dad to get the tree out of the loft and when he relented we all got busy decorating it.  It made me cry and the strange feeling of having a huge hole inside your gut stayed with me for the rest f the day.  It happens from time to time, its been almost 5 years for my dad and 4 years for my mum and every now and then I’ll remember something goofy my dad said or a funny hat my mother wore at times and it’ll hit me all over again.  I’m so glad I have those memories to relive and look back on.

     I just felt the need t blog about this because I know others that have gone through similar experiences and thought they might get some comfort in knowing that it does get better.  Every day it gets better and like I’ve already said I’m left with wonderful happy memories that I’ll treasure forever.

The truth of the matter is that grief does come in waves like they say, but it never stops coming. Sometimes days or even weeks will go by and then bam, I’m hit.

 

Thanks for reading anyway    www.skillfullyliving.wordpress.com

 

Roo