The Year of Firsts
The year of firsts without someone you love is hard.
I lost my mom — my champion, my best friend, and my favorite person on earth — on April 16, 2023, after a two-and-a-half-year battle with metastatic breast cancer.
When her doctor told her that her cancer had spread to her spine, liver, and lungs, she took it with a straight face.
“You should find someone to talk to through this,” her doctor recommended, knowing her time was short.
“I have my daughter,” she said proudly. “We talk every day.”
And we did. Every night. Or every day. Sometimes more than once a day. Text messages, phone calls, you name it. We were in constant communication.
My phone gets a lot less use these days.
My husband asked me the other day, “How long is it appropriate to say we’re in a rough place right now when turning down invitations or social events?”
There isn’t an answer.
The year of firsts is tough and easy for people to understand. But in truth, ten years from now will be hard, too. If I wake up feeling sad that my mother is no longer here, then I’m sad because my mother is no longer here.
Even though I wasn’t blindsided by her death, I was still blindsided.
And aren’t we all?
Stage IV cancer is nothing to trifle with. She was a nurse in her career, and she knew how serious it was. And when she told me she was going into hospice, three days before she passed away, I knew it was coming fast.
She was too tired. She didn’t want to go but she didn’t want to stay. Her body didn’t want her to stay anymore.
“I’m not scared of dying,” she said to me two weeks before she died, up late watching SNL reruns together, like we often did when I came home for the weekend. “I’m scared of missing all of you.”
I bit back tears and smiled.
“But you’ll never really not be here. Now you can be everywhere.”
When she made the choice to move to hospice, I was out of state caring for our elderly aunt in Arizona and staying with a dear friend. I called when my plane landed, as I said I would, and she broke the news.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m going into hospice,” she said. She’d fallen again that night, and the hospital that looked her over said her scans were looking pretty bad.
“You’re so damn courageous and I’m so damn proud of you,” I told her after I took a minute to breathe. “You’re such a badass. I’m proud to be your kid.”
She smiled and laughed. “Thank you for saying that. I wasn’t sure how you’d react.”
My eyes welled with tears, which I tried to fight away.
“I want you to go when you’re ready. You call the shots this time, not the cancer.”
Two days later, she couldn’t handle in-home hospice anymore.
“Your dad and brother can’t do this alone,” she said to me over the phone while I was still in Arizona. “I’m going to the hospice house. They’ll have the right people to care for me.”
She was a hospice nurse for over a decade. She knows how well hospice works, and how comforting it can be. And she knew when to call it. For herself and her family.
“I’ll see you as soon as I get home,” I’d told her.
But before my plane could touch down in Iowa, she was gone.
I’d talked to her that morning on the phone. She was weak but sedated like she wanted to be. I told her what a good mom she was. How I’ll miss laughing with her, joking with her. How I’d miss her calling me at random for something she saw on TV or something she found that reminded her of me, and vice versa.
I told her I’d never stop being reminded of her. And I’m not. Not now, not ever.
“Don’t wait for me,” I told her, and she made a small noise, like a whimper. “Go when you’re ready. I love you. I’ll see you when I get there someday.”
I like to think she slipped away with that blessing. Even though I wasn’t there physically, she knew I was there. She died around 4:30 p.m. CST, the same time I was in the air, flying home when I got struck with a pain in my chest and an unstoppable, unfathomable set of tears.
She knew. I knew.
She deserved a good death, a mother like her. What a good mom she was.
Facing the first anniversaries
She and my dad would’ve celebrated 51 years together on May 28.
“Happy anniversary,” I said to her photo and small urn on my bookshelf. “You two always taught us how to keep going.”
I talk to her sometimes.
My birthday on June 1 came and went. No phone text message filled with emojis and kissy faces from her this year. I missed that more than I thought I ever would. She’s still my #1 favorite in my contact list.
And her birthday came and went, too.
“72,” I thought when July 31 hit the calendar. I looked at her photo and said, “Happy birthday, Mom.”
It’s still her birthday. I don’t care that she’s gone. To me, July 31 is always Mom’s birthday.
Dad’s birthday was in September, and we had him drive out so my husband and I could take him to a university baseball game for the Iowa Hawkeyes. He’d never been. We laughed, ate hot dogs, enjoyed the sunset, and watched a winning game.
He cried on the drive out to us, and the drive home. He never made the drive to see us without Mom in the passenger seat.
So the year of firsts? Milestones, birthdays, and other things that person’s not there for? Wish them well anyway.
Facing the first holidays
So the holiday season is nearing, Thanksgiving is behind us. She was never a big fan of Thanksgiving (and loathed cooking), so I laughed when my husband made a big, fancy meal for us because like her, I’m not a big lover of cooking though I fare a little better than she did.
But Christmas is coming in a few weeks, and that was her favorite holiday of all. She loved to shop. We could shop until we dropped, we loved it so much. And even though she’s been gone all these months, I still see things in the store and think, “Oh, Mom would love this!”
That won’t go away either.
There’s no way to combat the year of firsts. You take each day as it comes. Some days I wake up and see her picture and blow her a kiss. Some days I break down for several minutes, dry my eyes, and carry on. And some days I lay under blankets missing her like mad.
In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes.
My advice as someone going through the Year of Firsts without her favorite person?
Take a day at a time. No, an hour at a time. No, a minute at a time.
Take it a microsecond at a time.
Smile at the memories you have with them, whether they liked cooking big meals or preferred to swear in the kitchen and get it over with like my mom did.
Think about things you wish you could buy, even if you can’t. It’s OK to pick something up, think about them and set it down. Or hell, buy it for yourself to think of them.
At her funeral, when I delivered her eulogy, I said: “Mom will never be a was. She can only be an is.”
She’s still with me, all the time.
I remember my mom with each book I read, because we always shared books. I think about her when I buy a purse, because oh how she loved purses. I think about her when I can’t sleep, because she was a night owl too, and we’d often call each other at 1 a.m. just to watch TV together.
Whenever these things happen now, I smile. I cry, too.
And for God’s sake, cry. If you feel the need to turn on the taps, turn on the damn taps. I’m crying streams of tears as I write this because I’m thinking about her. But I’m also smiling because she’d love that I’m doing this, sharing this, maybe — just maybe — helping one other person out there.
Grief isn’t a hole we fill in. It’s a hole we grow around.
