Surviving Mothers Day

Today is Mothers Day, and tomorrow it is exactly nine months since my mum died.  She has now been dead for the exact amount of time it took for her to create me. 

Surviving her death has been surreal.  All those things I imagined grief would be, it isn’t.  I thought losing a loved one would start with a massive heart ache, that would gradually decrease to a dull pain, that you learn to live with, becoming part of the fabric of who you are.

It isn’t like that at all.  I think until now i have felt numb, almost like it hasn’t really happened.  Not so much that I expect her to walk back through the door again, more like I keep remembering what has happened, like a punch in the belly, I feel like I keep finding out she has died all over again.  Like that instant in the morning just as you start to wake, and reality seeps in as you begin to open your eyes- you try and cling onto that peaceful oblivion, to run away from that ache-in-the-chest, lump-in-the-throat feeling.  I experience that feeling several times a day.

I am having trouble letting her go.  I still have dads mobile number listed in my phone as “Mum and Dads Mobile”.  The last book she ever bought for me remains unread, as I feel that if I read it, I am losing something of her.  Dad gave me a box of teabags the other day, from when she was going through one of her herbal tea phases, and it comforts me to drink that tea, as I know she bought that tea herself, imagining how she would enjoy it whilst sitting on the couch in her favourite jammies and bed socks, whilst watching Frasier.  The box is now half empty, and I am dreading the day when there is only one tea bag left.  But what do I do, keep it?  Drink it?  It feels like it is one more thing of hers to go.

Now I am finding that the shroud of denial that has enveloped me this past year is slowly being stripped away, and the pain I am feeling is far more raw and almost tangible.  Until now I have been able to hold off the despair, push it away, lock it up so it doesn’t show, but I am finding it is becoming too big to hide, that this box it is in is becoming too small. 

I thought it would get easier but it doesn’t.  And now Mothers Day is here, the first one without her, and I feel at a loose end- how do you honour someone who is dead?  It is like our relationship now has a full stop, when up until now I had felt like it was just a comma, a brief pause before the rest of the story. 

But her story is over and Mothers Day feels empty and wrong without her. 

I can’t wait for tomorrow.