At this time tomorrow my mum will have been dead for one year. My biggest learning from said year is that nothing breaks like a heart.
Over the past few days I have noticed that the pressure I felt on my chest in the weeks following my mum’s death is back. At the most inopportune moments I feel like something is squeezing my heart and I have to place a hand over it to try and relieve the pressure. I have to keep reminding myself to breathe. I do not have much appetite. I am full of tears that refuse to fall.
The first anniversary is said to be the most painful. I wholeheartedly agree. It is one thing to say it has been X number of months since my mum died. But saying it has been one year … there is an irrevocability in the one year anniversary that was not present in the monthly anniversaries. I am aware my mum is dead. Duh! But there is something about the one year anniversary … my mum now feels dead dead.
The first year is also when you mark occasions for the first time without someone who had been around literally all your life. For me those occasions were:
- My first Christmas without her
- The first New Year’s we did not wish each other a happy new year
- Her first birthday without her
- My first motherless Mother’s Day
- My first birthday without her
All those firsts will culminate in the first year without my mum tomorrow. I knew it would be a difficult year but I grossly underestimated just how challenging and painful it would be.
Last week I wanted to remove a word from my Microsoft Office custom dictionary. I had to Google how to do so as I am a tech idiot. It was then I got to learn that my mum had added words to my custom dictionary when she was using my computer before she got her own. I cried. Something that innocuous made me break down because nothing breaks like a heart.
Parents are not supposed to bury their children. I know that. But knowing so does not lessen my grief in any way, shape or form.
Grief is the last act of love we can give to those we loved. Where there is deep grief there was great love.
While that quote from an unknown author is true it does very little to ease this heartbreak. I suppose it is both a good and a bad thing that the pain I feel is directly proportional to how much I loved and was loved.
Lwile the Leo 