- A Process -
One of my online friends who also lost her mother disclosed to me that when she is really thinking of her mother she often comes here to this site to read through the poems, she expressed that it gives her comfort and a sense that her mother is close. Needless to say that revelation indicated to me that this website has achieved it's purpose.
My friend and I often turned to each other to talk for it sometimes has felt that no one else understood what we were feeling on a given day. Unless a person can put themselves in another persons moccasins and walk a mile in them only then could they truely understand. People who have not yet experienced the significant loss of a close loved one cannot fully understand just what it is that those who are bereaved go through. They can appreciate and sympathsize or be empathetic but really don't comprehend the magnitude of the grieving process.
My experience of dealing with grief in respects to my mother didn't begin the moment she took her last breath here on this earth. It actually began with the slow deterioration of her health over the course of the last 2-3 years. Since the spring of last year there was an inner knowing within my soul that my mother would be making her transition much sooner than any of us would have wanted. With each occasion of a new health problem, each hospitalization it seemed to take just a bit more of her each time. It was as if she was slowly dying piece by piece, day by day, a series of tiny deaths before the actual one became the reality.
As time marched on so too did the presence of pain and suffering. Amid the many health problems she had the most prevalent was the ever increasing mini strokes she was having, robbing her of the woman she had been. The changes in her personality were subtle at first but with time became more apparent.
The beginning of the end I believe came in December of 1999 when she had the first of the 3 full blown strokes she had. She was never the same after that. She spent the rest of her life in the hospital. My mother was a tenacious woman and fought back through many illnesses but this time she had reached the point where she couldn't fight anymore, exhaustion came with the 3rd and final stroke.
One Sunday in March I had decided there was a need to go back home and see my mother one last time. Within a few hours it became more urgent for me to get back home, where my mother was, as soon as I could.Thankfully through
the love and generosity of a cousin of mine, Theresa and her husband, I managed to get home in time. I arrived at the hospital four hours before my mother walked to her new life of peace. It is said that people who are unconcious can still hear. I truely believe she waited to say good-bye, waited for
all of her children to be with her, I being the furthest distance away.
Thus began the other part of the process of grief that society recognizes yet generally really doesn't understand until as individuals we are touched so intimately by the death of a loved one. Society in general recognizes death in the family by three days of mourning that is given to the employed here in the western world. However 3 days is just the beginning of a long process of coping and learning to live without a loved one's presence in our daily lives.
Much has been written about death, dying and grief. However there is no guidebook, no map, no timeclock to punch in and out with to explain what grief feels like, what direction or how long it will remain. Although some authors have articulated grief is encompassed in a handful of stages really it isn't that simplistic let alone etched in stone.
