Loss after a lifetime of love

I wrote the following only three days ago and never got to finish it:

“I’ve been in this place so many times, as have my precious extended family, all those under my parents’ line.  We have watched Mum go downhill every couple of months where she is hospitalised and she’s back in there now.

“It’s times like this that I prepare myself for when Mum is gone.

“As I scrolled through my Messenger conversation with Mum over the years, there have been so many humdrum moments that I’d forgotten about so many of them, until I re-read them.  I’ve been saving my voicemail messages of Mum into sound files.”

But now Mum’s gone. . .  I realise that there is N O T H I N G that any of us family could have done to prepare for the moment.  No matter how much we HAVE prepared.

For me, it matters not one iota that I’ve written on grief and counselled so many over the years through loss.  For me, and for my family, life is just plain so unfair.  We don’t know how we’re going to live without her, but as was pointed out by one of my brothers yesterday, we need to live for each other more than ever now, particularly for Dad, as Mum’s legacy lives on.

Mum was such a powerhouse of service to her family and friends that her kindness and joy—despite her massive health challenges—spoke as if in unison with Dad’s gentleness and humility.  These two have been inseparable for 60 years, ever since Mum intentionally tripped Dad over at the Bullfinch (I think) swimming pool in July 1962.  Their marriage has been a beacon of light about what it means to serve the other with a love that knows no other way but to sacrifice for the other.

My Mum has loved her husband, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and her friends, so astonishingly well that loss after a lifetime of that love leaves us floored for a response to the grief we’ve been cast into.

I’m no stranger to grief, after losing my first marriage 19 years ago and taking so long to come to terms with it, and then losing Nathanael in 2014, which was heartbreak on an unprecedented scale in many ways, but today I’m at a loss to see how I could even move forward.  I know that somehow I will, and I know that that is Mum’s will—that we do—but this is next level grief.

To lose someone who has been there for each of us through so many personal and private battles, a person who defines the best in terms of motherhood, not just to three sons, but to four daughters in law, and to her grandchildren as well, is incomprehensible.

Some will think that it’s weird for me to write this on the same day as my dear mother left this earth, but what else can I do?  Like the rest of our family, I’ve poured out my tears dozens of times today, real ugly crying, and it brings little solace, but is also necessary.

The number of times my Mum and I spoke about death and her death on the phone over the past two years, the number of times I recited with her Psalm 23 (a favourite of hers), the number of times she said she knew where she was going—to reunite with daughter, Debbie, who Mum and Dad lost to stillbirth in 1973—is phenomenal.  What is more phenomenal is her absolute willingness to talk about these matters.

The journey of grief has only just begun, and the first stage is absolute shock and the terror of the thought that from now on our journey is without her.

But we can honour Mum’s request now that sincerely she wanted to go first, that it would have crushed her had any of us gone before her.