5 Things To Expect When Your Mother Dies #mom #breastcancer #grief

Quotes of Wisdom is on hold to allow for something different to evolve, same day and time, Fridays at 9am (Pacific Time Zone).

My mother died six weeks ago.  I’ve had a few thoughts on the subject.

5 Things To Expect When Your Mother Dies  

1. Her lipstick is left unfinished on the bathroom counter. The day my mother died at home from metastatic breast cancer I slipped both sticks of her lipstick in the bathroom drawer. I couldn’t help it; I thought seeing them might hurt my dad, not that he wasn’t in the agony of grief already. Not that there aren’t a thousand other triggers.

Six weeks later I pulled them out because I had to know what color they are. Wet-n-Wild 965 Cherry Picking and 523B Light Berry Frost. I swiped a line on a piece of yellow tablet paper. They are my winter complexion colors, too. Do I take them and wear them or stash them in a memory box or my jewelry box or throw them away? I put them back in the drawer.

2. Flu season hits like a tsunami of vomit.  First, it was the gut flu.  The pharmacy is out of the nausea medicine because the whole world is puking as if we are in Stephen King’s Stand By Me.

A week later everyone’s coughing up a lung and the doctor says “your kid has an asthma cough and this is influenza.”  Is it a new asthma diagnosis or bronchitis? “Oh, and by the way, he has a sinus infection too.” Lovely, another first.

When my father started the cough, I loaded him up with cough meds and couldn’t see how I’d go on living if he died too.

3. You can’t go to sleep at night or wake up in the morning.  I read, write, read, write, read more, then turn out the light. My mind flashes images of my dying mom dragging me from the edge of a moment’s bliss and I toss and turn and sweat through my personal summers in the dead of winter. Her menopause summers never ended, a side effect of Tamoxifen & chemo’s brutal ovary bashing party.

Her summers, all of them, are over.

4. You’ll pray for blizzards or power outages so you can stay in bed. The Great Blizzard of 2018 forecast in our neck-o-the-woods didn’t materialize.  But I got to spend the two extra days at home like most people around here had planned to do anyway. “Sorry kids, it’s off to school you go!”

5. If you’re lucky, someone will bring you a massive lasagna-sized Shepard’s Pie and you’ll eat every life-sustaining bite for seven days straight, unable to figure out what else to eat.  Your friend will remember you cannot eat dairy, but your family won’t touch a zucchini if their life depended on it, so you’ll still have to figure out what to feed them.  Greek Style Lactose & Wheat Free Shepard’s Pie

If you enjoyed this post then stay tuned! Follow by email to ensure you don’t miss next week’s continuation of 5 Things To Expect When Your Mother Dies. Clearly, there’s more to the story.

If you liked this post you might also like: Quotes of Wisdom 24 – In My Mother’s Garden – A Rose in Honor of My Mom, a Courageous and Adventurous Spirit #grief #breastcancer #amwriting

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