Into the Bone

Losing someone. It happens to all of us sooner or later. I lost my Mom almost nine years ago to a wretched, aggressive demon called Inflammatory Breast Cancer. Unlike "regular" (if there is such a thing) Breast Cancer, IBC attacks quickly, ruthlessly and worse yet, stealthily. For the first month (after finally going to the doc after being in pain for a month) my mother was misdiagnosed because this particular demon presents itself as an infection (swelling, heat, pain). By the time the docs figured it out, the demon had invaded her bones. After brutal chemo sessions, during which the nurses wore heavy cartoonish rubber gloves to inject the poison into my Mom's port, followed by a radical mastectomy, and finally radiation, my mother gained an extra year and a bit of life. Through it all she was a trooper. Whether it was pain, violent nausea and vomiting, losing all her hair (and her moles and anything else that relied on fast-growing cells), the confusion, the fear and the frustration, she maintained a ridiculous level of caring for others, worry for me and a sense of humor. When the cancer was diagnosed as once again active in May, 2002, she had one dose of chemo, experienced excruciating pain, medications that eased it but also obliterated her short-term memory and said that was enough. It was her choice to end all treatment and enjoy whatever time she had left. One Sunday in June, David and I decided to move our wedding up about a year so that she could be there with us. We were married two days later in a ceremony hastily but beautifully put together by my aunts, uncle, cousins, friends and grandmother. My Mom was there, in heart, mind and body. It was, to say the least, a bittersweet day. Lynn Rae Bedell died on a late summer day in my aunt's house in San Rafael, surrounded by family and frankly, ready to be done with it all.

Her story is not unusual. Too many of my friends have suffered with their loved ones in completely different scenarios that are, nonetheless all too familiar. I can only imagine how my siblings felt as they watched our father slowly deteriorate then die in a hospital in Maine. The number of friends who have lost their parents to disease while they were still way too young, is disconcerting at best and at worst, horrifying. The thing is this though, it doesn't matter when or how you lose a parent. My Mom could have lived to be 104 instead of the 58 years she did achieve and it wouldn't have mattered. I distinctly remember that I wanted to die too, because I didn't think it possible to survive the pain of losing her.That is right, losing a parent is, in my humble opinion, one of the two greatest losses we face in our short lives. The other must be the loss of a child, which I refuse to even contemplate.

When we lose our parents, especially if we are close to them, we suffer sort of a double-whammy. Not only are you suddenly without the person (or people) that nurtured, guided, and loved you unconditionally (even with all their quirky and even annoying habits, rules, demands, etc.), but you are also, in our society at least, expected to get over it almost instantaneously! The chronology is as expected, your parents die before you. If they were very old, the pressure is even greater to "get over it" and move on with life. Well, I am here to say that such expectations are NONSENSE. Losing my biggest supporter, advocate, and the person who would always be most proud of me was devastating. Suddenly, the one person who knew the real me (from birth no less) and thought I could do anything was gone. I hardly knew my father and what I did know of him was both charming and dark. Even so, almost two years later my heart aches at the loss of at least the potential (for knowing me, my daughter, my husband, etc.) attendant with his death.

Loss hurts. Friends, lovers, family, people we admire, when they are gone the pain is palpable and the sadness can linger for a very long time. After losing a parent, that same pain travels below the soft tissue of the heart and lodges itself in your bones. It can cause your joints to ache, make you not want to get out of bed, forget how to smile, lose your appetite and make you generally angry at the world. Over time and with the support, love and patience of others, the pain eventually becomes something one can live with, like an old injury that usually aches and occasionally stabs, making you stumble within the routine of your life. We need to give ourselves permission (society be hanged) to travel the path that gets us to that dull ache.

Three weeks after my grandfather (who was my male role model growing up) died in 1998, a friend asked why I seemed so down. I mentioned that I guessed it was because of the loss and my friend said, "Still?" As infuriated as I may have been, I believe he said what others must have been thinking. Well sure, I would have loved to honestly have been able to feel at peace and "over" his or my Mom's death after a short period of mourning. Nobody wants to feel like the biggest bummer in the room. It is so important, however, to be able to take whatever steps are necessary to get you to a personally acceptable place. We all need to be able to fall apart when we see their favorite film or hear their voice in an old message because such experiences help us to heal, if we let them. It has only been in the last two years that I am finally able to talk about my Mom without crying (as long as we don't talk cancer).

All of these thoughts are resurfacing as I watch a friend star in those all too familiar scenes in which her parent is being stolen from her. I feel her pain; her anguish is my anguish because I have been there. There is nothing anyone will be able to say or do for her except let her go through it; hold her or let her go, cry and laugh with her, let her rage against the injustice of it, and through it all, love her anyway.