
I may be in this familiar situation several times a week, sat at a cluttered dining table with an ageing mother and her daughter, tense from months or more of fighting the wild fires of escalating care needs, never once being ahead of the game. A mother in denial and a daughter in frustration and despair.
Today was different in that, my own mothers care came to an abrupt end this week and I ache to share with the daughter “tread gently, this is the most precious of time” knowing I myself would not have heard the wisdom in it until, like now, the moments passed. I wanted to share that these last conversations will be magnified in the days after for their goodness or their impatience. The beautiful ones are easier to bare, the others cruelly easier to remember.
There are surprisingly, gifts with a terminal diagnosis, you get an awareness of the value of time, you get to say “I love you” and hear it said back, with a depth that comes from no other circumstance but this, and knowing it’s simply enough, to have said it. That it carries the forgiveness for all wrongs, and a laying down of grudges because there should be, in this time, no space left for them. The “love you too mum” is the most unconditional you’ll speak, because in the face of looming loss you see that the love is all that remains, maybe because in the end it’s all that matters.
The price though is the grieving starts early along with the diagnosis, and that precious time is shadowed by the looming darkness of death approaching. So it’s a season of swinging from denial to frustration, to firefighting, to over compensating for the guilt of wanting out, but knowing the only way out is the very thing you are fearing. After clearing out my mums fridge months before the goodbye, I found myself sobbing over two saved and dried wishbones tucked in a corner of the kitchen. A little symbol of gripping to any hope that the future didn’t hold the truth of what it eventually did.
Eventually when that loss comes, it seems that if we’ve grieved well in the interim, lived the moments in their fullest, then peace and acceptance fills the moments that grief hasn’t noticed. The normal things like cooking the dinner, changing the bed, getting up for work remain little places of refuge where the loss hasn’t crept into. It still may yet intrude, these are early days in this journey the other side of the cross. But I trust I’m sat outside the tomb, leaning back against the entrance, yes mourning, but facing East waiting in hope for the resurrection of a hurting heart. I do trust that when I’m ready to walk away and leave it be, I will. And when I’m ready to return and face it, the stone will be rolled back and it will be empty, the grief will no longer be there.
Even here though sat outside the tomb there’s a comfort that the pain matches only to the depth we have loved, there is a weird solace from that, the pain is a final offering to the one you’ve lost. It says “You meant something to me, you touched my life, I see who and what you were. My life is irreparably changed from your passing”.. For how long? Well that I’ve still to discover. There is a danger I’m told in clinging to the pain, no one wants to in reality but we are complex creatures and we weren’t created for these separations.
I confess I prayed for this release for my mum, a heartfelt prayer for her healing Spiritually, physically and mentally, Knowing that short of a miracle that could only be answered in her death. Only in dangerously unguarded moments do I wonder if that was a fullness of love or an ugly lack of it. The answer is neither, I think. In equal measure I didn’t want to her to suffer and I didn’t want to watch her suffer. For the part that wanted to spare myself that pain there is a light shade of guilt that it wasn’t all for her sole relief. In His mercy God answered anyway, after all, she was His daughter long before she was my mother. For us, It was an unexpectedly sudden release, no time for bedside vigils, no gathering of a family for final goodbyes, just the small comfort of the ones said “just in case”. I could feel cheated, I could choose to feel cheated but it was a hard edged answer to a prayer, and no doubt the best one for her and In time I will see for me to.
The goodbye continues….