Welcome to the Club

I don't believe in therapy so this is my personal therapy session in writing....this may not make any sense at all. But here I am.  After my mom died, one of my best friends welcomed me to the Dead Mom's Club and said I had a year of membership ahead of me.  (I think it should be life-long membership, personally.)  So this is my first entry into our newsletter.  It's not a club that I wanted to join, although I guess there is a part of me that is grateful I'm here now and not when I was in my 20s.  I should consider myself fortunate to have gotten almost to 40 and still have both of my parents; I was a late in life baby so my mom was almost 80 when she passed away.

I didn't have the picture-perfect relationship with my mom.  In my Facebook announcement of her passing, I said that she didn't win any Mother of the Year awards, which I think may have been an understatement.  We had a a bit of a strained relationship due to all of the things she put me through in my formative years. She was an alcoholic and heavy smoker; it's amazing I lived to be an adult for all of the crap I inhaled and endured.  Once she stopped drinking and smoking - after a heart attack that could have killed her - she was just 'normal'.  'Normal' for her was telling you exactly what she thought, no matter what the consequences.  When I left my husband, she told me I was ruining my life.  Never mind that he treated me like I was his employee, never consulted me on any decisions and spent more time with his family and friends than he did with me.  I was getting divorced and that was shameful.  I stopped speaking to her for about two weeks until my sister convinced her to call and apologize.  I forgave her for all of the abuse and craziness that happened for all of those drunken years when I was in college; but I didn't forget.  I still, to this day, harbor a grudge - it doesn't matter that she's dead.  It still sucked growing up with an alcoholic mom.  And that made it difficult for me to be nice, generally.  Whenever she was being a bitch, I called her on it, which she didn't like very much.  I didn't take her crap, like my sister did.  So she was closer with my sister than with me, which was okay by me because of our past history.

I'm the youngest of three; well, I WAS the youngest of three until my brother passed away in 2011.  He was an epileptic, didn't take care of himself, and he took two seizures back-to-back that killed him.  I have a sister who is the quintessential middle child; she wants everyone to be happy and won't rock the boat to save herself.  I'm labeled as the bitch, she's the good one.  When something happens, whether it was my brother's death or my mother's, I walk in and I figure out what has to get done and I do it because no one else does or can.  I tell everyone what we need to do, where we need to go and when.  It was no different when my mom died.  Which made grieving all that more difficult because I was so busy being the cruise director of her funeral that the first time I really cried was when I got to the funeral home.

I’m not mad at her for dying.  I’m mad at her doctors for letting her die.  Had her doctors been more observant and more proactive, she may not have died from this.  If this had been caught a year ago, she would have needed surgery and maybe radiation or chemo but she may have survived.  If she could have survived, I would have wanted that.  I didn't want her to suffer or feel sicker than she already did, but I wanted more time. But she didn’t have a chance.  No one sent her for tests; her blood tests were normal so I guess no one thought anything of it.  Just continue on the course and keep telling her she needs to eat more.  I have to wonder if her decreased appetite had anything to do with the cancer.   Yet another thing on the list entitled "you'll never know".

 

She really had no signs of it, until the end.  Everyone chalked up her weight loss to her not eating enough.  My mother was happy about the weight loss; she always called out the fact that my sister was overweight and needed to be thinner.  My mother wasn't always thin, mind you, but she liked that she was and relished in the fact that she was getting thinner. She didn't see it as a problem.  The shortness of breath came about two or three weeks before she went into the hospital; the abdominal pain was only about a week or so prior to then.  As far as we know, she didn’t have blood in her urine or pain before that aside from the back pain. Her cardiologist thought she had fractured a vertebrae, but after an x-ray we knew that wasn't the case.

 

I hate myself for not pushing her to go to doctors and have tests done earlier.  I'm the one that forced her to see her cardiologist in November; she stopped speaking to me after that, too. If I had made that call sooner, who knows what may have happened. It’s possible that a doctor would have said there was nothing they could do, given her a life expectancy and that would have been that.  But maybe she could have been treated, maybe she could have lived longer.  She might have made it to my daughter’s 2^nd birthday; she could have heard Emily call her Grandma and tell her that she loved her.  Maybe those things could have happened.  I have to add it to that list and that makes me sad.