When the bough breaks…
I am currently sitting in a cafe sipping a coffee waiting for the oil change of my car feeling all kinds of bougie with my laptop and journal blog open. Putting metaphorical pen to paper, especially in this moment feels somewhat cathartic, as I am, embracing another transformative shift in my life.
On December 20, 2022 I unexpectedly lost my mother. It has thrown me in more ways than one, knowing that our relationship was often not the easiest for me to navigate. Death never really scared me, and I don’t fear it. It is just another plane, a cycle of one circle closing and another one starting. Much like grief and the process of moving though it, there really is no end nor beginning, rather a merging of energies, emotions and moments of both cherished memories and spilling of tears.
What I was not expecting was how this process would take over and consume me. I have always been the person that people turn to when they are in their own turmoil, looking for guidance or support. The empath part of me often feeling quite physically what they were going though, in one way helped me be able to reach them on a different level. Those that know me more personally know that my dark salty humour has taken the forefront even more so, humour is definitely a coping skill especially the really dark kind that might make strangers question my sanity. This part I could handle. It was the moments alone, in spaces where I didn’t have a little quip or comeback to buffer the floodgates that have been standing at a moments notice, waiting to spill. It is the memories that are popping up after hearing a song I haven’t heard in decades and instantly remembering childhood memories, both positive or negative. Floodgates are like that you know… once you open them… be prepared for the outpour. And the sense of time, has me completely lost. Not even a month, and it feels like a lifetime of anguish exemplified.
My mother was a force to be reckoned with. She had her own traumas she may or may not have dealt with, and had experienced harsh lessons in her life that may have contributed to her shifts leaving her at times jaded and bitter stuck in a place of sadness or anger. She lost her own mother when she was 13, came out when I was 5, at a time when it was safe within our own home to be our authentic family, but not in the community. She lost her partner Susan to a tragic motorcycle accident when I was 17, holding her in the final moments of her life. She told me later that she felt and saw the presence of spirit with her until emergency services were able to arrive on scene. My sister and I would talk about how we wished our husbands had seen her when she was vibrant and loving life, laughing, traveling, and full of light and energy, for when one has a number of traumas in their life, it can quite literally change your brain chemistry. The bodies way of protecting itself creating a harder shell to keep the heart safer.
Our decision to move to BC from Alberta played an important role in my healing of our relationship. The distance did us better, allowing for more healing to happen and a shift of more pictures, texting, calls and Facetimes. She was happy for us, getting out of toxic spaces and knowing that we were collectively as a family feel better about basically everything. In the summer, I would walk along the ocean, chatting with her so she could see the waves, and the gulls, and watch the sunsets with me. I would send her videos of nature walks, birds I hadn’t heard before, and pictures of my own bewilderment that even in the coming Winter months everything was still green and growing!
After loosing her, the simple act of texting or “I need to send this video to mum” sends me into a spiral of both gratitude and anger. I am absolutely grateful for the healing that had happened, I felt that I had my mother back, that there was a relationship that was budding out of desire and not obligation. But this is also when the anger sets in. Hard, red hot flashes of my own feelings of resentment and bitterness. That taste of what I had wanted and wished for years, snatched right out from underneath me. No warning, no softer transition like we had always thought it would be. A call that she was in the hospital and that I needed to come now. Nothing. Just death. Imminent, and in my face.
Grief has its own wisdom, giving way for compassion and growth when wounds that are open and exposed begin to heal. And I do believe that there needs to be a balance of both light and dark in our lives to bring us to our best version of ourselves. Grief allows space for retrospection, a pause that runs on its own timeline. I know that my anger will shift, and lessen, and that this too will give provide me with opportunities that will align exactly where I am needing to be in my own journey.
I will take her with me in different ways now, hoping that at times, I will see her in the waves of ocean, and the sea glass she had an affinity for. In the songs of the birds in the forest walks, and the smell of the earth when I am grounding my own energy. I know that this healing will take time, ebbing and flowing like everything else… But it has shifted my own perspective on many things… to which will be shared another time.
