Have An Adoring Weekend

Today would have been my mother’s 60th birthday and my parents’ 38th wedding anniversary.  I write about her on two different days each year: her birthday and wedding anniversary, and on the day that she died.

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I’ve written a bit about missing my mom in the past, about various thoughts I have on death and dying, as well as end of life planning.  I’ve written from the perspective of being her caregiver.  Today, I have little to say…just a mixture of happy and sad feelings in my heart.  I regularly think about giving her a call.  It usually takes a few happy seconds before I realize I cannot do that.

This summer I am embarking on a journey with my father on the Pacific Crest Trail.  This trek is so much about her, and so much about him, and so much about all of us.  Death causes rifts.  I feel like ours is just starting to heal, to scar over and adapt to the passage of time.

P.S. December 16 2015, May 27 2015, December 16 2014, May 27 2014

Part Of My Story Belongs To My Mother

Recently, a new friend of mine asked me about my story…about my mother’s death and about my own cancer diagnosis.  While seated at my lovely friend’s dining room table, all the time hand sewing a gift for my grandmother, I told the cliff notes version of my mother’s diagnosis, treatments, and death…followed ultimately two months later by my own Valentine’s Day biopsy surgery and my own diagnosis.

I cried….but I did not fully enter that space either.  That space of sorrow and loss still feels like such a black hole of grief and pain.  So much still feels missing from my life since my mother left.

I wish that my mother could see what I have tried to build here…what Lacuna Loft has come to mean to me.  At the same time, without my mother’s death I’m not sure Lacuna Loft would have come to be.  It is intriguing to me how these things in life evolve.  How rebirth can come out of such loss and sadness.

Happy Birthday Mom

Today, my mother would have been 58 years old and my parents would have been married 36 years.  We post a variety of personal stories here on Lacuna Loft, focusing on caregivers, survivors, and fighters.  My mother is a huge part of my personal story even though she wasn’t able to be here during my cancer diagnosis or treatment.  She wasn’t a young adult cancer fighter but she was too young and a cancer fighter all the same…and I was proud to be her caregiver.  I think about her everyday and I miss her.

Family christmas 2008