Her pain ended, mine worsened

[Anon_def21]

Hi there,

I'm a newbie to this but I thought I'd give this a go a speak out.

Here's a bit of context... My life was rattled, starting two years ago. I used to think I had the most amazing life until darkness started impeding on me. BOOM! Year 11, highly anxious person, constantly trying to reach others high expectations of me being the ' good child', the ' smart one', the ' happiest and nicest person there is.' I felt like I was wearing a mask all the time, I never revealed how I truly felt or what was going on at home. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma brain cancer... the day I saw her shaking , her mouth drooping, nearly falling off her face, her speech slurring and hearing her say her arms felt numb... then seeing my older sisters rush her to hospital the day with were throwing a family party is a day I WILL NEVER FORGET. Then weeks lately finding out the truth of what she had or what had caused this to happen. Painful. Time progressed to when I was in year 12 , ' The big year', I saw mum fully deteriorate to the point where she didn't even look like my mother, she was unrecognisable. But her heart of pure gold was still radiating from her crippling body, trapping her. Seeing her smile when I achieved A-grade results, pushed me to keep achieving high marks. Soon I became college captain for year 12 , everyone knew me. But did they actually truly know me... what I'm going through at home... the family conflicts, the pain, the torture, the projective anger all my family members were putting on each other as the stress and anxiety just got too much. I spiralled, saw sooo many different counsellors. When exams came, I honestly don't know how I survived, but I did and somehow got an amazing ATAR.

But it as half way through year 12, my closest friend, my mother, the person who truly understood me, started to not be able to pick which person in the picture was me. Her memory started to fade. Hospitals became home. Then one night, her breathing was irregular. One point she was breathing, the next it stopped, then started again. THAT WAS THE LAST TIME I saw my mum 'alive'. She died, I saw her dead body, I can't get that picture out of my head. Now I'm truly struggling to get through university without her. She believed in me and was the only one who had the ability to lift me up from the lowest of lows. But she's not here anymore, I will never see her again. The greatest person, VANISHED. WHY?

Most of all, I miss saying to her, "I love you mum"

[PamelaR]

Oh Anon_def21, your story has made me cry. That's something, I don't do that easily.

I am glad you've been able to find your way to Beyond Blue (BB) forums. I send you the warmest of welcomes and let you know we are caring, supportive, friendly and respect individual's privacy. We all have different views and perspectives on life. So what I say here may differ significantly from what others may write to you. That's okay. You have the ability to chose how you want to see life.

You ask one of the hardest questions I've had to answer - the greatest person vanished. Why? How can I answer that for you.

I lost my 17 year old brother when I was 12. He taught me how to count, read, write, swim, surf. Then all of a sudden gone. I can't explain why some one vanishes, I'm sorry. All I can say is, we are born, we live our lives and then we pass away. It would have been awful for you to watch how your mum declined with her illness. Some lives are shortened for whatever reason. If you are christian, you might get some peace from that. However, I take a Buddhist view on life that says -

• In the teaching of the Buddha, all of us will pass away eventually as a part in the natural process of birth, old-age and death and that we should always keep in mind the impermanence of life. The life that we all cherish and wish to hold on.
• To Buddhism, death is not the end of life, it is merely the end of the body we inhabit in this life, but our spirit will still remain and seek out through the need of attachment, attachment to a new body and new life. Where they will be born is a result of the past and the accumulation of positive and negative action, and the resultant karma (cause and effect) is a result of ones past actions. This would lead to the person to be reborn.

• Fear of death stems from the fear of cease to be existent and losing ones identity in the world. We see our death coming long before its arrival, we notice impermanence in the changes we see around us and to us in the arrival of aging and the suffering due to losing our youth. Once we were strong and beautiful and as we age, as we approach our final moments of life we realize how fleeting such a comfortable place actually was.

You have achieved so much in your life, so wise and intellectual smart.

You are going through grief. It is never easy. It takes time for the scars to heal. You'll never forget you mum. I'm sure she's there with you all the time.

Let us know how you get on.

Kind regards

PamelaR