from the other side

[daylily guest]

Hi everybody:

Monday would have been my mother's 77th birthday, and Tuesday was the sixth-month anniversary of her death.

I wonder sometimes how I am "supposed" to feel at this point.  I miss her every day, but I also have to acknowledge that I feel a freedom I have never known.  I consciously chose the course of balancing her needs with mine, of trying to set boundaries and live behind them.  I don't have to do that now.  I don't have to worry about what to tell her, or how she would take something, or how I will deal with her next stealth missile.  I don't miss any of that, and I know it would be a great disservice to me if I simply dismissed it now.

But I do miss other things about her.  She and I shared some enthusiasms; we valued some of the same things.  I often enjoyed talking to her.  I know, too, that it would be a great disservice to her to forget any of that.

I feel very alone, and very old.  (I'm actually 43.)  My parents and grandparents are gone.  Nothing is left of my family in the town where my parents raised us.  The house they owned for more than 35 years now belongs to someone else.  I have no home but the one I make myself.  And while that's sad, it's exhilarating, too.  I can choose what to carry forward, what to honor.  And what to leave behind.

All the things she told me I could never have now beckon.  I am actively questioning who I am and what I want.  I'm not afraid, because I know that the only real mistake would be to live my life in the shadow of a ghost.  I did everything I could to honor her, and now it's over.  Now I must honor myself.

Her illness was a great gift.  It taught me so much about her strength, her dignity, her faith.  She suffered, and I only hope that I could bear that kind of suffering with the same grace.  Her illness also taught me a lot about myself.  I'm grateful for the lessons I have learned, because among them is a new belief in my capacity to love.

My mother loved Christmas.  She loved the decorating and baking, the music and lights, the great mystery and absolute simplicity at the heart of it.  She loved the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and the disintegrating bird's nest that my sister made in third grade.  She tortured us because she was absolutely impossible to shop for; she mourned the loss of anyone who couldn't be there.  She was a complex character, and my life is noticeably barer without her. 

I am looking forward to the new year.  There's so much I want to do.  I wish she could share it with me, and I know that if she were here, she could never really share it with me.

daylily

[gratitude28]

((((((((((((((((((((daylily)))))))))))))))

Thinking of you and wishing you peace with your mom and yourself. You are far from old... the grief is working its way through.
Lots of love.
Beth

[Hopalong]

((((((((((((daylily)))))))))))))))

I see through your story, how it may be soon.
Thank you for sharing this, and be at peace.

It's the last chance to be a child gone, and I anticipate it will be confusing for a while.

Or maybe life is confusing always and the only way to respond is as you have, with real grace.

Hops

[seasons]

daylily, much love and comfort at this tender time. I believe the first year is extremely painful, confusing and healing. Just last night I heard of the memories you think of now make you cry in the future those memories will make you smile.
I wish that for you.

(((Grief and loss is so different, know right way except your way..))) seasons

[pennyplant]

Dear Daylily,

Much of what you say rings true for me as well.  My father died over two years ago and so I'm farther along the curve than you.  And it is a different path in many ways, too.  There are as many ways as there are people.  But I understand that feeling of freedom mixed with the feeling of missing someone so important in spite of the difficulties their personality presented. 

And then, just this past week, I got an advancement opportunity at work which stirred up a lot of mixed feelings in and of itself.  For one thing, there are going to be plenty more of those "learning experiences" I seem to have so many of in this life.  And one of the learning experiences was how to share my news and who to share it with and how would they react.  And I realized that, of all the people in the world, even with all the problems, my father would have been the one who would have been the happiest for me.  Just genuinely happy for me and would have said the right thing in this case.  I just know that based on some past memories.  But I couldn't share my news with the one person (well, besides my husband) who would have had the best and most right reaction.  What a loss that felt like.

It's stuff like this that really brings it home for you.

I understand, too, the idea of what a gift the illness was on some level.  My father had a chance to become his true self because the illness eventually forced all the "coping" stuff to fall by the wayside (he may have had Asperger's Syndrome).  I saw the real man and that was a gift at the same time as it was a loss--you know, what could have been if he had been average instead of someone coping with this missing part in his thinking processes and social skills.  It's a real mixed bag to lose someone who you have had a close yet difficult relationship with.  Nothing simple about it at all.

And, yes, with this person gone, you have a freedom you never had before.  But it takes a very long time, in my opinion, to learn what to do and where to go with this freedom.  This is the kind of freedom many people get in their early 20s. 

It'll come in its time, Daylily.  Now you're going to become your real self.  It takes as long as it takes.  And it's kind of inevitable, I think.  It has a force of its own.  It sounds like you're well on your way.

Love, Pennyplant

[Stormchild]

Hi Daylily

My father died in 1997, my mother in 2000. Immediately after my mother's death, my only sibling behaved so criminally that, for all intents and purposes, she is dead to me as well.

I still occasionally miss my father, because there were good and valuable things that we shared. I would like to be able to miss my mother, but during the year following her death, a number of people who had known her confided in me about things she had done to slander me, more or less throughout my entire life, while pleading her neediness and helplessness to me and exploiting me both emotionally and financially. It became very clear to me where my sibling's criminality came from.

I'm glad that you have a different set of circumstances and that there was enough good in your relationship with your mother that you can miss her. I'm also glad that I have reached the point where I see my own parents with clarity, trust in my own judgement where they are concerned, and have confidence in my reassessment of their character.

I wish you the peace that I have attained, a peace that is filled with truth and light, that sees what is just as it is, can accept, and has gone beyond pain.

[Gaining Strength]

Pennyplant - I am so glad that your father and your husband would be and are glad for you.  (I am glad as well.) My father and my mother have never cared at all about what I did or any achievements I made.  I realized this year that my father's apathy was completely related to his narcissism.  My husband felt threatened whenever I achieved something.  That was extraordinarily painful - not only in his anger or ridicule when i receive an honor but in that it reinfoced what I had experienced growing up.  Though your father is dead his spirit isn't and I encourage you to rejoice with him and celebrate with him in you good news.  Just imagine here were there with you - what would he say and what would you two do?  His spirit is a gift to you. - GS

[pennyplant]

Thanks, GS.  You know, I can fully understand the double whammy of your husband's feelings about any of your accomplishments.  It is bad enough that FOO gave such negative feedback about your worth.  But there was still the hope that growing up and marrying would change all that.  There was still the question in your mind--I can't really be that bad, can I?  Then the most important person of all comes along, your husband, and it turns out, yes, I am that bad.  Even my husband, the one who knows me best and understands me best and values me most, even he has come to the conclusion that I'm no good.  Then out goes that little spark of hope that maybe the messages of childhood were wrong.  Nope, it turns out those first messages were right after all.  That's how I tend to think anyway.  Always looking for someone who will say, Wow, your parents were just stupid not to see how great you are.  We don't know yet, that we can tell ourselves that.  We want that other person, the spouse who chose us, to be the one to validate us.  When that person doesn't, well, what a betrayal.  Yes, those early messages keep playing over and over again.

It is fortunate that I got to see what my father was really like inside.  As hard as it is to watch someone die over the years, months and weeks, if I hadn't participated in that I might never have had any kind of explanation or closure about that relationship.  In fact, my sister never got that.  She has lived out of state for years and couldn't be there too much.  But I think her path was meant to be different than mine.  If she had been here that whole time, it would have added to the stress of it and taken away from the gifts.  So, while I wouldn't want to have to do it again, it was good that it happened the way it did.  It was a way that is part of my path to freedom.

Pennyplant