TWO THINGS????
In the weeks between my mom’s birthday and my own birthday (7/24) flew by, but I learned two things:
Cremation packages
Hospice
I remember the week before my birthday, my mom entered Hospice. She started to cry uncontrollably. I told her it would be like 1-800-FLOWERS. People hear the name and think it’s one thing, but it’s more than that! “You can always come out of it” We told her. She knew she wouldn’t. That’s the hard part with Brain Cancer, you never know what they understand and what they don’t understand in the moment. When my mom had entered Hospice, they would come to our house. She would not go to a home, but rather they came to us, which meant our house was a revolving door of people. When hospice came in at this point, my mother had been confined to our downstairs room. We made that room look so homey. Funny enough, before they renovated our house, that was once my mother and father’s room. Full circle, huh. I remember one day walking from the kitchen to the room she was in, and finding my dad and my aunt discussing intensely about something and researching on the computer. I intensely looked at the brochure they had on hand: Cremation Services. This was another moment in which I realized… we entered a new chapter: acceptance. As my mom lay in the room next to them, they knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. She probably knew it, but my mom knew it was coming. Accepting is such a hard thing to do. There is accepting, and there is accepting. I accept what is happening to me. What I accept is that I will spend the rest of my life not having a mother, and what comes with that. It is a thin difference, but a major one. Acceptance is what I struggle with every day. Even to now. There are days that my unaddressed trauma wounds open up, and I struggle to accept my reality. Other days I realize the situation, and I move on.
