Here we are yet another Mother's Day. My fourth since losing Brian. It seems each year I have fewer and fewer children in my life. Brian was missing Mother's Day 2015. By 2016 I'd lost my relationship with my oldest son too. And by 2019 my relationship with my daughter is destroyed as well. So by the fourth Mother's Day after this loss I'd lost all three. Not the same loss thank God but gone just the same. So does that even qualify me a mother anymore?
Traumatic death and unresolved grief - the gift that keeps on giving.
It's been quite a year.
I retired after 35 years in commercial insurance and over 50 years of working a public job. And since I retired...
I watched my dear friend for over 55 years succumb to lung cancer while her daughter and I sat by her side in the hospice.
Shortly thereafter, my daughter quit speaking to me.
My sister almost died in December. She went by ambulance to the hospital with a temperature of 105. She spent the next two weeks in ICU totally unconscious on total life support. Her organs began to shut down and her body temperature dropped to 73.
She was dying.
With literally thousands praying for her and a God-sent nursing staff on Christmas Eve she awoke from a coma and after two more weeks in the hospital she was released to a slow and arduous recovery that is still in process six months later.
The night after they had called all the family in not expecting her to live - my son calls me in a rant. He doesn't ask about my sister shows no sympathy and no concern but cusses me out and hasn't spoken to me since.
I spent a day in the ER --my second time ever in 65 years.
It took me four years to try and recover from the hurt and betrayal and attempt to reclaim the lost relationship with my best friend of 42 years...and one conversation for her to tear it down again.
After almost five years. I finally have an appointment "this week" to see a counselor and I have finally given in two months ago to antidepressants. I fought it for four and a half years but that is a long time to wake up and realize after all that time I was no better. I still had no will to live and no interest in life. The depression was killing me and I was killing every relationship I ever had. I was not sleeping. I was eating myself to death and my blood pressure was out of control.
That said, things were not all bad.
The antidepressants have been a God-send. I wish I had allowed myself to get help long ago.
Though I still lost my friend, because I had retired three weeks earlier I was able to go and be with her and her daughter when she died. She did not die alone. She was in a wonderful compassionate place with the two people she would have chosen to be with her.
Though my sister almost died - she didn't. She shocked the doctors and the nurses and against all odds came out of it and with apparently no damage to her vital organs which they did not believe possible. She is now not only walking again but driving now. Thank God for the miracle we witnessed with her. I know she was a testimony to the power of prayer and the grace of God to a lot of the staff at the hospital too.
The antidepressants have helped me. And I am finally getting sleep and by pure "accident" due to a recall of my BP Medicine I was put on an alternate that after 20 years finally has my BP under control and totally normal.
And though I don't have my other two children and nothing can replace them, my church family and my extended family and old friends and new have come along side me to pick up the slack and keep me from going this alone.
God is good after all.
