I’ve been trying to articulate all of this in words for awhile now, partially because it will help me but also because while my story is not especially unique, I don’t seem to see it spoken about much.
Talk of death, coping mechanisms, social aspects of being a survivor, and more below the cut.
In the early fall of 2017, my mom had some headaches. I’ve had migraines in the past and what she described sounded like a migraine to me, so I suggested typical migraine solutions. She didn’t do much for a day or two, then never really mentioned it again.
Some time around this period, she mentioned the headaches to her doctor at an annual appointment. The doctor made some suggestions concerning an eye exam, which were not followed up on by my mother.
In the late fall/early winter of 2017, she and my father were walking near the plaza before church when he noticed that my mother was dragging her right foot and leg. When he commented on it, she wasn’t aware she was doing it. A minute or two later, she staggered and he had to catch and steady her. He told her to see a doctor.
She had an MRI on Wednesday, December 20, 2017. I was sitting in the parking lot of the local theatre, waiting for a friend to arrive so we could go get new piercings. While I sat there in the dark on a frigid December evening, Mom told me that she had a mass in her brain that was causing pressure and swelling.
On Thursday, December 21, 2017, around 3:30 in the afternoon, my father accidentally texted me when he meant to text a friend of his. My mother had a brain tumor. She was given 6-8 weeks without surgery, and a maximum of 24 months with the surgery. I was sitting in my classroom, watching over what I jokingly called the ‘Social Anxiety Room’ where students who didn’t want to participate in the more raucous end-of-semester activities could hang out, read, play video games and drink tea. One of those kids went to get the counselor, then the principal while I sat at my desk and panicked. My principal took me to the cafeteria where I had a meltdown while other teachers had the kids put my classroom back together. 1 of my coworkers and his sons helped me pack up what I had to take home with me, then drove me home. I dropped my things off and went went to a basketball game because my parents weren’t home yet.
I was angry, then, that my father had tried to tell someone we had known for less than 5 years about my mother’s diagnosis before he told me. I’m still angry about that. I will always be angry about that.
I was in trouble when I did get home. My mother was upset with me because my father was upset. My father was upset because I wasn’t being fair to him or to mom. He said a lot of things I wish I could believe he regretted, but I really don’t think he does. I cried a lot.
On Christmas Day, 2017, in the evening after the big family dinner, my father drove my mom to a hotel in the city she would be having surgery in. One of the best neurosurgeons in the SouthWest as going to be doing it. She was lucky in that respect.
She went into surgery around 7-8am on Tuesday, December 26th. My sister and I saw her in the hallway, being wheeled into the surgical wing by a nurse or orderly who was laughing so hard he could barely steer. She was smiling and laughing, her hair all brushed up and back over her pillow.
She was in surgery a lot longer than they’d said. Three of my aunts came down to sit in the waiting room with us. Around 1, one of them and I went out to get food, because no one had really eaten in hours. When she was taken into recovery they told us it had gone alright. We went home that night.
The next day, I stayed at home to go to work, because they’d said it would be okay. In the early afternoon, my aunt showed up in the shop with no warning, telling me to lock up and get my things. She got me in her car and handed me a box of tissue. My mother’s brain had started to swell. She was going downhill fast. She had been given her last rites and my aunt was there to take me to the hospital.
Dad put me on speakerphone to talk to her. She had never really regained consciousness, but she was squeezing hands when she was spoken too. Even though he told me not to, I told her I was sorry, and he yelled at me for it. I will never forget that, being yelled at as I said goodbye to my dying mother.
She had stopped really responding by the time I got there. All her sisters had called on Skype and sang to her. My sister and father were sitting with her. We took turns sitting beside her bed in the ICU. Her entire left side was gone. I never saw her open her eyes.
I ate shitty hospital pizza in the cafeteria that night, with my aunt there. We went to Walmart to buy essentials and spent the night in a Motel 6, one of the only available places that night. My dad promised to call us when it was time, because she had been lingering all evening. My sister and I slept side by side in two narrow little beds on the second floor.
He called around 5am.
My sister and I held her hands and told her how beautiful it had been the day before. The day before had been her wedding anniversary. We like to think that she held on for him.
On Thursday, December 28, 2017, just before 6 in the morning, my mother passed away. She was 59 years, 1 month, 1 week and 6 days old. My father took us out into the hallway and told us to go. Not to stay while they came to take her body. We should go for a drive, he said, because he didn’t want us to be home alone.
So we drove. We drove out of Santa Fe and through Madrid. We took the Turquoise Trail to Albuquerque. Then we cut off the interstate and went to Las Vegas via Clines Corners. She took photos on the town square there, where they did some filming for some western TV show she and my father like that I can never remember the name of. We drove up through Mora, past Penasco and down US Hill. She dropped me off to get my car. I went to a coffee shop to meet a friend who had the time before leaving on a family trip to hug me, buy me a coffee and talk to me a little.
My mother had Glioblastoma Multiform. It’s a rare form of brain cancer, and it is 100% fatal in adult cases. 2 years at max was really just bullshit. She might have gotten 16 months, if there hadn’t been so much bleeding after the surgery. They think she’d had the tumor less than 9 months before the surgery. They say it isn’t genetic, but her father died of a brain tumor believed to be of the same variety, back when I was 5 or 6.
I have learned, in the last 6 months, that some people really suck. There’s this idea that bad things only happen to bad people and while my mother was not a saint, no one deserves to find a massive tumor in their brain and then die 8 days after the initial MRI. I have also had people telling me that I now cannot move out of my father’s house because he’ll be alone, which is a level of bullshit I can’t even delve into here.
But there is, I have learned, a strange chasm between the ages of 18 and about….40 years. If your parent dies before you’re 18, it’s tragic. If they die after you’re 40, it’s sad but to be expected. But when you’re in between those ages…no one knows what to do with you. My mother wasn’t especially young, for a mother of two 20-somethings, but she wasn’t old enough for it to be ‘acceptable’. Yet neither I nor my sister were young enough for it to be just plain ‘tragic’. People alternately handle me with kid gloves until I want to scream and brush it off like it’s normal.
In one month, I will be 28 years old. I will have completed the first class of my Master’s Degree. I learned to make clothes for myself and others this spring. I presented with two highly qualified peers at a state conference and was very well received. I met the state Secretary of Education and spoke freely and candidly to him and other well-respected members of the educational and medical communities about my experiences as a young teacher. I made a quilt for a coworker’s first great grandbaby.
And yet….I still miss my mommy.
I just want people to let me do that in peace. More than once now I have heard ‘well it’s been months’. I was once told ‘well you should have taken bereavement leave, then’. I have also been told I’m ‘cold’. That I’m ‘handling it well’. That they ‘don’t know how I do it’.
I keep it inside. I have meltdowns in my car. Alone at my house. On a Sunday afternoon in the house I’m dog sitting at, while the wind blows rain against the windows and I should be planning lessons for this upcoming year. When I try to figure out how I’m going to pay for classroom supplies without her helping me. When I plan meals I can make in an all-day session on Sundays so my father and I can eat all week. I sit up late at night and cry. I lie in bed and hit snooze for the fifth time because I don’t want to have to face the world.
Two years ago, one of my students lost his father. He was 16. It was tragic.
Two years ago, one of my coworkers lost his mother. He was over 40. It was sad but expected.
6 months ago, I lost my mother. I’m 27. My mother is dead and my father is heartbroken. I’m lonely and exhausted and hurting and broken inside, and I’m tired of people behaving like losing your parent before both you and they are old is such an unusual thing.
Please treat us all the same. We’re fragile and hurting and we need help.
