My best friend just sent me an email, an update on how her Mother is doing. Her Mother is 53 and has been diagnosed with stage four Melanoma, and today they learned that it has spread and her expectancy is grim.
Now I don’t normally write such personal things on this blog, with all of the cereal and giveaway posts, it never seemed to fit here, but I need to get this out because it’s right at the surface, and if I don’t, I think I would just cry all day.
Hearing that she is going to lose her Mother has brought up all of the feelings I had when I found out my Mom was terminal with congestive heart failure……. You almost go through all of the stages of grief as if the person had died already.
When I first heard my Mother’s diagnosis, I did just that, I went right into denial, then I was mad, mad at the doctors, mad at her, mad at myself, you name it, and I was mad at them and just mad at the situation itself. Then inevitably, that bargaining stage hits, or the stage I like to call the “what ifs” – What if I had made her go to a Doctor sooner?
Depression is the next stage and I never really fell into it completely, I went into panic and anxiety mode where it manifested in my mental health declining but I kept it to myself, even though I felt like I was drowning in sadness.
When you look into the face of a parent on a daily basis and know their fate, there is a deep ache and an anxiety like I wouldn’t even be able to explain unless you have had it happen to you. I feel that for my friend now, I know what she is going through and what hurts the most is the fact that I can’t take that pain away and that she will have to go through all of the stages of grief on her own.
That last stage, acceptance, that never really happened for me, even when we had to turn off her life support………
I still haven’t accepted it, and I probably never will…..
