Death has arrived at my doorstep in a way for which I was not prepared. After doing my own war with it ten months ago, I feel uncomfortable to be staring it in the eyes again. Too many of my friends, close friends, are dying. Some slowly with the on-going, exhausting battle of inevitably terminal cancer. Some are staring right into the face of death as they fight against their brand of cancer and defiantly declaring, “It is NOT my time.”
And while all this has been happening, someone who has been a huge influence on how I have experienced life in the last 17 years has been wasting away into nothingness. None of us knew.
My former mother-in-law died early this morning, alone in a nursing home at the age of 48 from complications of a lifetime of immense mental illness. The torture that she put her son through until he became a man at age 14 and left to walk the streets alone – feeling safer there than in her domain – created a wounded, damaged man whom will I love to the end of time. To hear him crying with remorse and guilt and anger and joy and every feeling piled on top of the other breaks my heart.
I don’t know how I feel in this moment. I don’t know what it looks like to be there for him. For me. For my daughter, who barely knew this woman, but knew her nonetheless. I don’t know if I am sad or relieved. I don’t even know if I feel at all about this.
Perhaps this is the “numb” stage of grief…
