I lost my mom at the end of February this year. She spent two years fighting lung cancer and we knew this day would come. Knowing doesn’t make loss any easier. My mom was an amazing woman. She left this world 70 offspring…9 children, 27 grandchildren, and 34 great grandchildren. She left us her legacy of strength, love, and perseverance. But legacy doesn’t eliminate grief.
Grief after a brain injury is challenging. As an empath, I struggled with grief before my aneurysm. After my aneurysm, it has been debilitating and impossible to navigate. I can’t process life without my mom and what that means for my family. My mother-in-law had passed more than a decade ago and that crushed me. She and I were extremely close and I held her hand as she drew her last breath. I was familiar with this type of loss. This soul crushing loss. What I was experiencing now was different.
As family gathered around my mom’s bedside and held onto her, we knew everything would be different. In my brain, my mind was bouncing between grief, guilt, pain, laughter, loneliness, and fear. It couldn’t land on one thing. My anger was palpable and I couldn’t hone in on all of the emotions. I couldn’t process the unimaginable feelings of despair. My strongest emotion has been anger. It has become the hallmark of my grief cycle and it’s been confusing and worrisome to me.
When I processed the loss of my mother-in-law, I cried…sobbed…for a month. It rarely let up. I felt lost without her because we talked daily and suddenly that was gone. Her death was sudden and unexpected. I understood the feelings and I let myself feel them and process them at the speed that my mind wanted to. I gave in to the grief and let myself heal. It was hard, but it was helpful. There were days for years that I would think “I need to tell her about this” and then I would remember I couldn’t. All normal parts of grieving.
Now, my emotions are changing by the minute and it literally feels like someone is spinning a wheel inside my head as I go from sadness to anger to fear to hopelessness in a single breath. And more often than not, the emotion I gravitate most towards is anger. There is no reason for this anger, yet that’s where I seem to settle.
Anger is a common emotion after a brain trauma. Many survivors find themselves getting angry for no reason. There are cases where survivors who were laid back before their aneurysm now struggle with anger. For others, they were angry people before and the rupture added fuel to the fire, making them even angrier. For me, I recognize that I was a high strung person before my aneurysm and would find myself getting angry when I was stressed at work. I wasn’t an angry person when I didn’t have that stress. When I left my job after my aneurysm, the anger went away. I became calm and positive during most of my recovery. Don’t get me wrong, there have been moments of despair, fear, and sadness, but anger hasn’t been an emotion I dealt with regularly in recovery. Now, however, that emotion is ever present in dealing with this grief.
This year has been a challenging one. I lost a cousin who was dear to me and had stepped into that emotional role of mother-in-law, my uncle, and now my mom. Add to that a global pandemic and quarantine and emotions are raw. I recognize all of those factors and how they play into this grief process. Everything that happens, adds to an already emotional period. And, at least for me, everything seems to be larger than it really is. Small things to everyone else seem like mountainous obstacles to overcome to me.
There are moments when I even forget that mom is gone. Not in that absentminded way where you think “I need to remember to tell her that,” but in a truly I need someone to tell me that she is gone. Due to my short term memory problems, I have days where I have completely forgotten and being told is like starting this process all over again. It’s painful and frustrating. And then I get angry…at myself…for not remembering. It’s at that point that I add in the grief of what I have lost due to my brain damage to the grief of losing my mom.
It’s taken me awhile to figure out how to handle the anger when it comes on. There are moments where I’m crying as I think about mom and in an instant, I’m so angry I want to hit something. It is in those moments where I recognize the grief and realize that I need to channel it appropriately. Rather than ignore it, I acknowledge that is part of my grieving process, accept it, and use it as an opportunity to remember a happy story about her. It allows me to transform that anger and remind myself that I don’t need to be angry, that I have so many incredible memories of her life. She was a blessing to so many people and I am honored to have been her daughter.
That’s actually what I want to leave you with…a wonderful example of who she was. There are so many to choose from and she deserves to be honored. I am the youngest of nine kids. My siblings are 7-17 years older than me so mom and I had a lot of alone time while the older kids were in school. Mom was ever present in our lives. Dinners were always together and after dinner, we’d sit at the table and she’d help everyone with homework. Some nights, she’d play the organ and I’d sit and listen and watch, in awe, as her hands would quickly move across the keys. She was a brilliant woman. She showed me what strength was every single day. Some of my favorite moments were the times I spent just with her. When I was in high school, she would occasionally come into my bedroom in the morning and ask if I had a busy day that day. If I didn’t have any tests or anything major she’d ask if I wanted to stay home and bake cookies with her. We’d go out to lunch, bake cookies, play cards and chat about life. Those were some of the greatest days of my life. She always knew what to say. I grew up hearing “I love you” every single day. And I never doubted it. I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have been raised by such an amazing woman. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why I’m angry. I know I will never be able to call and just say…”mom, I need you right now” and I’m angry at the world for having to give that up.
