That’s the weirdest part about grief: feeling out of touch with reality.
It’s like this: your brain has to adapt and accept a reality that is utterly unbelievable. “Mom is dead” feels like it’s some sort of foreign language, or the title of a sad movie. The kind of movie that I’d watch with mom, we’d both comment on how sad the story was, maybe shed a few tears and then go back to living our normal lives. We’d say goodnight, and the next morning we’d be having coffee together in the kitchen. Maybe some days I’d be grumpy and wouldn’t talk to her, but she’d still be there, on the couch, doing her thing.
It would never cross my mind that maybe one day she wouldn’t be there. Okay sure, I know we all die at some point. But mom… well she’s not the type of person to die young. She’s the type of person who will live until she’s 90. At the very least! She’ll be very old, and after having lived a long lovely life surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she’ll die peacefully in her sleep. But even that, I don’t really think about, because it makes me too sad.
So imagine… that now I have to grapple with this new reality. This reality where mom died at 62 after having battled and suffered, and lost her mind due to her brain metastasis, all of it in a short period of 5 months. My brain simply can’t comprehend it.
I keep looking around, thinking “this is just so weird”, whether at her funeral or looking at her gravestone. It’s like this is a movie, or a (not so funny) candid camera where all of a sudden the filming crew will come out of their hiding place yelling “gotcha! Your mom is not really dead! HAHA”.
I even mentioned it at the funeral home, where her dead body was resting in the coffin for everyone to gather and say goodbye. I told her “this is just so weird isn’t it? you in this coffin?” and I swear I half expected her to open her eyes and reply, “yea it’s soooo weird isn’t it?” and then go back to being dead.
And that’s how it’s been for 1 year now. Part of me is waiting for her to come back and for us to finally be able to “debrief” and process all of what has happened leading up to her death. We’d cozy up in the sofa with a hot cup of tea and gossip about the hospital staff that took care of her, how handsome the doctor was, how annoying it was to be bed ridden, how crazy all of it was, but then how it all came back to normal by the end of it. We’d even laugh about it all, thinking that it was all just a big misunderstanding. Like she could die so easily!
But no. This is for real for real. She’s not coming back. And I’m honestly kind of mad that she didn’t prepare me for this moment. How did I never consider this possibility? She did have a cancer before, 10 years ago. But even then, I knew she’d make it through. It’s like her dying wasn’t even a possibility. Moms don’t die. They don’t die until you’ve already built your own family, and by then the death is natural, in the order of things. Neither she, nor anyone ever presented me with the possibility that she would die prematurely. Or how to prepare for it when it comes.
How come no one prepares you for this kind of stuff? I mean.. it’s gonna happen to everyone! If there’s one thing that would seem essential it IS THIS! How to grieve, how to prepare for the time that the person you love most will die. But no, we all live our lives avoiding what’s inevitable. Avoiding the one thing that we know will happen.
And when it happens to someone else, we say we’re sorry, but we keep going on as if “We’re different. This happens to others, not us”.
And this is why, when it happens to people like me, it’s like the rug has been pulled from underneath your feet. And you feel, out of touch…