Chapter Four. Happy Birthday Mum.

Today is my mother’s birthday. It would’ve been her sixty first. We didn’t do anything big to celebrate her sixtieth because we weren’t sure she would be up for it. As Mum dealt with complications associated with the chemo and the colostomy bag she preferred to not have people around. The milestone went by quietly. Today was another quiet day. There’s been no celebrations, just reflections on a life that was.

Death is so confronting in its finality. There’s no gentle distinction between being alive and being dead. Even when a person is unconscious, the presence of their body gives some comfort. To be able to touch them, sit and talk to them even if they are unable to respond. Just to be in their physical presence may be heartbreaking but it’s better than the absolute absence that comes with dying. It is difficult to process the fact that the physical remains of my mother are contained in a small space behind a plaque on a brick wall.

Even though her physical body is gone, there are so many ways in which she is still present. My habits and interests were strongly influenced by my Mum. I like making things with my hands and giving handmade gifts. Things that Mum made are scatted around my house. A lot of my favourite recipes came from her. There’s the memories and the photos as well. There's so many other things but my brain has shut down for the night.

No matter how much I wish my Mum was still here, she is gone. She will never age past sixty. I won’t pretend our relationship was perfect. We were as much the same as we were different. I’ve been told many times that we had the same personality. The most important factor was that we loved each other fiercely. My only wish is that we had more time to work things out. Who knows what could have been?

So I sit here alone on the night of her birthday. I wanted to do something to celebrate but I had no idea what to do. The weight of missing her sits heavy with me tonight. I know there is nothing I can do to bring her back. I can only remember the good times we had together. How happy she was to be a grandmother. Because even though we were robbed of the future, the past cannot be changed.

Chapter Three The Power of Vulnerability.

I spent the first week of July driving around the incredible country that is north of Auckland. It was a holiday for just Lucy and I.  All the research I had done told me that it was a beautiful part of New Zealand. It’s so cliched but I have to say it. Nothing prepared me for how beautiful it was. Hiring a motorhome meant no strict itineraries. Being able to make plans up as I went along was exactly what I needed after the crazy that has been this year.

On the second morning I was making breakfast. The previous night we stayed in a caravan park I found by surprise. It was off the main highway going north, down a twisty steep descent which ended at a grassy area between a cove and a small beach covered in black shiny rocks. I had parked the motorhome with the back window facing the small cove. It was beautiful. That morning while cooking breakfast, the new album from Florence and the Machine was blasting through the speakers. During the second song Florence sings ‘we all have a hunger’. I was dancing around like an idiot in the tiny space between the stove top and the bathroom door. Lucy was on the floor laughing that baby laugh. There was so much happiness in such a small space.  And then the tears started.

I cried and kept crying throughout that trip. On the way to Cape Reinga I cried while driving down tiny roads surrounded by chicken farms. At night when Lucy had gone to sleep in the back, I sat at the front and cried in the dark. In the country that my mother was born and left before she was a teenager, I found it possible to start grieving her death. I also found the ability to really enjoy my daughter’s presence again. I found the power of vulnerability. To honestly sit with my emotions and just let them be.

In the last few weeks things started getting hard again. I was already struggling to deal with the weight of everything when we hit a period of teething followed by the flu. The lack of sleep made it next to impossible for me to regulate my emotions. I felt sadness waiting to engulf me like a tidal wave. I tuned out. I was tired, I was numb, and barely functioning. But then a small moment broke the dam wall. Something Lucy did made me laugh and the tears came as a relief. I started engaging with the world again instead of just going through the motions.

The thing with emotions is that you can’t just numb the ones you don’t like. I know because I’ve tried (and if we’re being honest, I’ll try again in the future just to double check). Shutting out the sadness meant shutting out joy. The world went from being full of vivid emotions to a watered down, grey colour. And that was fine for a while because I had some tough times to get through. Planning a funeral and telling people of your mother’s death requires a great deal of resilience. I’ve used the strategy of shutting down so many times in my life. This dysfunctional emotional regulation resulted in years of dysfunctional relationships. I needed a way off of the merry-go-round of dysfunction so that I can be a positive influence to my daughter. The last thing I want is for this crazy to be passed onto another generation.

The only way out is vulnerability. Sitting with and acknowledging emotions. Not necessarily buying into or investing in each emotion, but seeing their worth as they exist in the moment. Vulnerability is hard. It’s near impossible to keep up at all times. But if there’s a choice between actively engaging in life and shutting down, I know what I’m choosing.

Don't send the flowers. Send Love.

It was a Tuesday afternoon when I received the phone call that Dad had died. It came as a shock. He had been in palliative care for several months, but it had begun to feel like he was never going to die. That night I crashed at a friend’s place. The following week I completed the ten-hour drive to Mum’s for the funeral.  

When I arrived at Mum’s house it felt like there were flowers everywhere. With a strange pride she gave me a grand tour of who sent what. Each day as new flowers arrived, another tour would be conducted. Statements of people’s condolences were written on the small cards. It made Mum happy to know that people cared.

After Mum died flowers started arriving. It was lovely that people thought of doing something nice. After one particularly large delivery I found myself getting annoyed. It wasn’t that I dislike flowers. I love flowers. As a little girl I was the horror child stealing them from people’s gardens. Now I’ve got a garden bed of my own  planted with colour. It doesn’t matter how beautiful a floral arrangement is. It does little to help reprieve the hurting during a time of grief.

When I got home from helping sort out Mum’s estate, one of my friends arranged to have a cleaner come to my house to help sort out the mess it had become. Another regularly babysits so that I can have some alone time to grieve. I’ve had friends cook for me and bring me coffee. All these practical things left me feeling loved and helped with the healing process. All the flowers did was die and leave a mess.

Don’t send flowers. Send love. Engage you brain. Use your imagination. Figure out a gift that will help.