The day my mom died (ten days ago now), I published a diary as a sort of homage to her. I had worked on it over the previous ten days that she was receiving hospice care at home; it was a way to work through the emotions that were stirred up by her impending death. It did help, and it made her obituary a lot easier to write.
That diary was for her and for me.
This diary is for me and for the dozens of others here who have suffered the loss of a loved one, and need a place to vent or commiserate about it, with those who share their values and are in a similar spot.
A few of us mourners have been in contact, and we think it would be of great help to have a weekly support diary, just for us. If this applies to you, come on over the fold and join in.
My story is pretty simple. Mundane, even, to those who aren't me. My beautiful, healthy, relatively young mother contracted pancreatic cancer one year ago, at age 67. I didn't know anything about this cancer (I had lost three of four grandparents to cancer: prostate, lung, leukemia), but never this. A quick perusal of the web, and a discussion with my physician brother convinced me that she was at death's door, and my mourning really started that day.
She lived a year - a relatively rare feat with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. There was one crisis six months ago that she survived (more details in my diary), and a whole lot of "closure" - a whole damn YEAR of closure - of saying "I love you" because it might be the last time, of wondering whether each event was the last one of its kind for her.
The pre-grief sucked. It just plain sucked.
I decided to stop grieving her while she was alive, and I even let myself slip into taking her for granted again... stopped calling daily, etc. Sometimes it seemed like she might be able to just continue her chemo (which wasn't bad when it didn't give her an infection of some sort) and go on for years.
But, it didn't work out that way. One day, she got a pain in her back, and went to the hospital, and the final, slow decline began. It took two months to kill her.
SO: Grief. This kind, the "normal" post-death kind, is hard. It's easier in some ways than the "feeling doomed" one gets in a terminal illness... but it's still no picnic.
Reading about the stages of grief, I always thought they would progress in a logical order: I would have denial, then anger, then bargaining, depression, acceptance, yadda, yadda, yadda. Come to find out, it's more like the Wheel of (Bad) Fortune: take a spin and see which stage comes up THIS hour.
As a write, I'm in denial. I seriously feel like I could pick up the phone and call her. Well, I can... I've saved two phone messages on my mobile for over a year - the very last two before her diagnosis. She was already sick, but we didn't know it.
I plan to renew those messages as long as they'll let me. It helps to hear the mom I once had, speaking to me from a place of seeming health.
Share your story - it feels good to ramble it all out.
[EDITED TO ADD: if you find this helpful, or will someday, please rec so that others can see and participate. Hosting will rotate as often as needed. Thanks]