Marketer Jen

A colleague lost her mother over the weekend after a long, long battle with cancer. After talking to her yesterday, I realized just how long with lots of ups and downs. I told her that she now belongs to our “club.” You know who you are out there…the people in their 20, 30s, and early 40s who have lost a parent. If I live to be 65 years old (I sure hope so!), I will have lived longer without my mother than with her. I found this devastating when I thought about it. My sister only has to live to be 42 years old!

It isn’t that we are an elite bunch, but the club understands how suddenly you can be totally happy and having a great day and suddenly well up into tears - usually from a thought that I want to call her about, looking at a picture, or just remembering. I put it in writing one day as a comment to another blog and I have talked about this often with my friends and colleagues.  I went and found the comment and here it is:

The death of a parent was the hardest thing that I have ever gone through in my life. I ended that day in disbelief and said to my husband “My mom died today. I cannot believe it.” Each day now is one of three things: 1. I hardly notice that she is gone, it is life as usual. 2. The pain that she is gone is so intense that I can’t breathe. 3. The anger that I feel is so bad that I want to break everything in sight.

The angry days usually revolve around the fact that the last year with my mother was extremely difficult to get her to actively participate in my life, my newborn’s life, and (seriously) her own life. It is also just the anger at being here without her.  When I know of or hear of someone’s parent dying, it rips open the carefully placed band aid that I have put over all of this stuff. I try to explore my feelings more but that is hard to do too.