“I had never felt so lost and in a black hole before, I felt like there was no way out”
It was a Sunday in February. I had just passed my driving test the previous month but while on my lunch break from my Sunday job something told me to drive home immediately. I was a teenager and had just changed schools, was working weekends to save some money and learn some real world skills. My family had planned a mid-term break in Tenerife and we were going in a few days. When I got home, my mum opened the front door, she looked very confused, with a towel in her hand, staring at me. “Mum, mum, what`s wrong? Speak to me mum…” My stomach began to churn, I panicked, she could not answer me…she coughed and tried to speak… but no words came out – I screamed to my dad to come to the front door….he came and said he had been trying to get a word out of her for 2 hours… TWO HOURS….! Why did you not do something sooner I thought?!
My mother and I were extremely close- I was an only child and we were each like the sisters we never had. We would finish each other’s sentences and create new jokes to tell. Our bond was special and different. The shock of what was happening took me back to 2 days before my 3rd birthday when my grandnana, who lived with, us collapsed and died in front of me and my mum…a brain stroke. How could lightning strike twice?
My grandmother and aunt came over (Dad’s side), we had just lost my grandfather 3 months prior and we were no strangers to the hospital my mum ended up in that night. After a long night, my mother was taken for surgery to remove a blood clot on her brain….no doctor could explain why- she had no indicators they said, although she suffered migraines for as long as I could remember growing up.
Within 2 weeks she was home again but something wasn’t right- her speech never returned properly. Upon coming home she became very unwell again, and further surgery uncovered a brain tumor..I remember feeling scared and somewhat relieved, as I had seen on TV that brain tumors were curable and it felt like we had got to the bottom of it…somehow.
I will never forget when my father collected me from my weekend job.As soon as I got in the car, he blurted “it’s cancer, Charlotte”…his face the most dire and serious I had ever seen- I had never seen him like that…it terrified me. Upon reaching the hospital, I saw that my mother was better than I’d ever seen her since being ill. She jumped up and started talking to me, she was making other patients laugh like only she could. I felt a huge sense of reassurance. Things started to get better, she came home, got her independence back, started to live a relatively normal life…Gwen was back!
I was in a total haze at school for all the time my mother was ill. I remember walking home each day feeling scared- would she be well, unwell – questions were always raging back and forth on my mind. The ‘never knowing how she would be’ each day meant I was always on high alert, feeling a pinch of adrenalin every time I opened the door when I got home. How would I feel if she got worse…?
A few months later in June, after coming home with mum from treatment, I happened to notice the paper with her treatment written on. I saw 2 words which will never leave me: “glioma multiforme”, the name of the tumor. I hadn’t seen that one mentioned on TV and back then, no Google or cell phones- perhaps a medical dictionary would tell me more on it…
The doctor said to me ominously when we left her radiation treatment that day that she needed to take it easy…and we soon started noticing changes in her like, moments of aggression, tripping over, erratic speech. We got to July and I was told to go on my school trip to France. I actually wanted to go. I felt like myself. My dad had got overly focused and paranoid watching my mother and her health- I needed to escape, if only for a few days..
While in France, I got a frantic call from my father that I was to come home immediately as my mother was back in hospital with seizures. I had dreamt only the night before his call that, weirdly, she was in prison, on death row and was being asked what meal she wanted as her last…the dream, though totally off track, confirmed my subconscious worry…
Palliative care…my teenage brain couldn’t get its head around those words. When I got home from France I went straight to the hospital where a nurse blurted out that my mother’s brain tumor had grown. I ran to her side with tears in my eyes, she was angry that I had found out. Within days she was moved to a hospice.At this point I was telling myself she was coming home soon. She had lost all her hair from all the chemo and radiation, she had become swollen from steroid treatment, yet she was still my mum, still Gwen. The warmth, her smile and light in her eyes was still there but she seemed scared all of a sudden.
I will never forget one of the nurses starting to speak to me, when I was looking out the window in the main entrance area, trying to hide behind the curtain. The nurse told me softly and in the best way she could, that my mother was not going to be coming out of that hospice…I couldn’t look her in the eye. I hated her, I hated her for telling me what I didn’t want to hear. I rushed away from her with tears burning down my face. My child self could not accept this, why should I? My mother was young, vibrant, full of life, healthy, a non-drinker and non-smoker who had so much more life to live…why was this happening, why?
Trying to imagine life without her was hell, I couldn’t go there. I cried myself to sleep every night for all the time she was ill. Not so long after that moment with the nurse and during the school summer holidays, my mother passed away after being put in an induced coma to ease her passing. It was the day before my father’s birthday. She was fully aware what was going to happen before the moment she was put in a coma. I was in the room with her- I can still see her face now, the tears in her eyes and the pain and fear on her face, it will never leave me. My father argued with the hospice staff. I was powerless and very afraid. How was I going to live without her? I learned in the lead up to her death she was asked who could be a mother figure to me after she had gone…my aunt Alma stepped into the role.
Gwen had the biggest funeral, which was fitting given how popular she was. I only remember the seas of faces that day, my Dad said 500 or so people were in that crowd and we walked up the church behind her coffin with my father holding my hand. For the whole time it was like an out of body experience, I wasn’t really there, I was looking at myself at a funeral and I kept telling myself it was my mother in the coffin to convince myself that her death was a reality. I was totally numb and couldn’t cry. The next thing I remember is the coffin disappearing behind a screen and me wanting to throw myself into the vault with itWe got back in the funeral cortege of cars and my family didn’t say a word. Everything felt desolate and nothing mattered anymore. I was in despair but I could no longer express my emotions…all I wanted to do was sleep forever, because by sleeping I could not feel the pain of my mother no longer there.
The numbness was to carry me through the rest of school exams and then on to university….where I threw myself into studying and having as much fun as I could…going out every night, socializing to the max. I was 3 hours away from my hometown so going to see my father was rare, only during end-of-term and mid-term breaks. I barely spoke to him during that time. I felt a burning anger that, given he was so much older than my mother, how could he be the one that was still alive? My grandmother too, was almost 90 and how was it that she could be that old? Here was my mother, young with so much to give and gone. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore, the young aren’t supposed to die young.
I managed to get really good grades in my 2nd year of university…even though I was out partying for most of it..then in my gap year I decided to go to Brazil..as far away as possible.Anything to keep numbing the pain of grief and keeping it at arm’s length. I thought of my mother every single day. I threw myself into risk taking while in Brazil, almost got kidnapped and didn’t take my safety seriously. I was living in Recife, one of the most murderous cities in the world and nothing scared me anymore. In fact, walking alone at night in the most murderous city felt exciting, as did wanting to put myself in potentially dangerous situations. Not phoning or emailing my father for weeks on end and not caring about his worry for me was normal for me then. In a cruel way I wanted to punish and hurt him for my mother no longer being there, somehow it was HIS fault and I distanced myself from him.
In Brazil, it got to the point where I refused to go to the university I was supposed to go to. I wrote a persuasive letter to my lecturer justifying why I had to move universities and stay in the most dangerous city. Later I learned it almost got me expelledThe not speaking to my father caused him to call Interpol and report me as missing. I was off the rails…I couldn’t cope with the grief, so I totally blocked it out and dissociated myself from everything. I did anything to numb the pain of not having my mother, getting away from anything familiar felt liberating and different. Being in a foreign country, where people were only just starting to get cell phones was exhilarating…I didn’t have one, I didn’t want one and no one could track me down.
I somehow managed to get fluent in Portuguese and came back to the UK from my time there to finish my final year at university.
It was a nightmare coming back to the UK…not only the new experience of reverse culture shock (no one smiled, when in Brazil EVERYONE did, all the time), I came back to my final exams- there was no way I could mess this up, my mother had wanted me to succeed and finish university since she didn’t have that opportunity and I wanted to honor her memory and wishes. In that year back in the UK, I became a total mess. I found myself having moments of uncontrollable crying, fears I was being followed when out, paranoid delusions and disinterest in everything and anyone around me. I had never felt so lost and in a black hole before, I felt like there was no way out. It felt as though I was moving through treacle to do anything, thinking was even a challenge.
A doctor at university saw me and said I was having a “delayed bereavement reaction” to the death of my mother…it made total sense, I had not grieved in the years she had passed. She put me on antidepressants, but in the years to come the grief would hit me like a huge wave, over and over and I felt like I was drowning…how could people say that time was a healer?They had no idea and it was very insulting to hear all these useless comments from people who hadn’t been through this terrible experience. I had become used to people’s thoughtless comments, feeling like they were trying to help me. I had become used to seeing families with a mother-figure present and feel pangs of envy I thought would never leave me. I would resent people who complained about their mother.
In the years now after her death, I can now say I am free from any depression for over 10 years. I look back and appreciate what my mother gave me and what she has allowed me to become. I choose to live life to its fullest and by practicing meditation, therapy and good habits so I am ready to face any other life challenges that come my way. I chose a career in sales which has been highly rewarding. The grief I experienced in childhood somehow made the ups and downs of the sales world bearable. Being hung up on and told no on a regular basis was not anything compared to what I had experienced. I can now look back on my mother’s death and feel thankful for the life I can live that she couldn’t. I am now a mother myself. I wake up every day and feel true gratitude for the life I have, for my husband and the family that I once took for granted by blocking them out as a way of grieving. There are moments when I can feel panicked about the future and what will happen, since my mother was fine one day and then suddenly wasn’t the next. I am constantly hyper-aware that things can change and there is uncertainty. In those moments I am comforted by the coping mechanisms and good habits I practice and can see the way out.
My relationship with my father improved once I started my career, I forgave him for my irrational feelings towards him and we ended up getting along so well. He passed away aged 80, a few years back and 3 years before my children were born. Having gone through death as a teen, the experience was no easier but I was better able to express my feelings and allow myself to grieve properly. Grief is a rollercoaster of emotions that you cannot control, you have to let yourself feel and recognize it for what it is, so you can learn to let it keep you living.
