Today I sat in a room full of chairs, across from a counselor, answering questions about why I need help. And as I spoke, I heard my voice saying all the answers and I felt my body and I saw myself clearly for the first time in a long time.
We discussed some dates and she said, so you feel worse around the anniversary. And I knew that was true.
She didn't die in March, but March is an anniversary of sorts. Two years ago, my sister-in-law Pamela, Kate and I drove out to a clinic in Indiana. By that point, Kate could walk but a few feet at a time due to intense pain, she weighed only 90 pounds, couldn't control her bodily functions and had an unnatural thirst that was never quenched.
She asked me to drive her out to a place that had promised to treat the cancer in her lungs, while claiming that her pain was caused by a broken tailbone, not the cancer that the recent MRI had shown spreading throughout her pelvis and femur.
Then when I refused,
"You don't want to drive me because you want me to die."
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Probably wondering why I'm writing these deep personal things. Out there into some place, maybe I can try to make sense of loss. Even though loss doesn't make sense.
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So, we drove out to Indiana, in the snow, in fear, trepidation...while she just got worse. And she wanted me to leave her out there in the hands of people who were charging thousands of dollars to shoot I still-don't-know-what into her veins.
Within two weeks of returning home, she went into the hospital and was told affirmatively that the cancer was throughout her entire body, brain, legs, lungs, hips...
But those months, weeks, days, minutes that she wouldn't leave the house except to go to a clinic pumping poison into her body haunt me everyday. Even though I know there was nothing I could do to change the outcome, I still wonder if only...then maybe.
And those thoughts and those words, "because you want me to die" can eat a person up inside.
I am empty.
I look into the mirror and I don't know who I am.
I push away people that I love, because why would anyone love someone who could make her mother think that she wanted her to die.
Since March of two years ago, I've wondered who I am. Where I am going and I wonder, did I want her to die.
And rationally, I know she didn't really think that. But I will always wonder...
There were questions about how spirituality fitted into my life, but I lost my faith a long time ago.
I felt it today though. As though there may be light, there may be a way for me to find some peace, or else learn coping mechanisms so I'm not some walking festering wound of a person, who cries everyday and sobs after leaving Target. And I want to hold onto my Mom as I remember her when she wasn't sick. And I need to learn how to block out those visions of her body as it slipped away, because that is stuck in my brain and I am stuck in life.
I hope that I can learn a new way to live and I can find my faith again.
Kate loved Aretha and wherever she may be, I hope that my she says Prayers for me.
