I’ve been struggling with how and when to address this topic…
When my mum died, my world shattered. One of my greatest fears, realized.
At the start of 2018, my mum was sick. For a while, at least to me, it was a mystery and she spent a lot of time in and out of the doctors. Then, we had answers: her cancer had returned. Once I finished crying, I immediately made plans to get to England and see her. However, not too long after that, I got a call saying that I should get over there now. I dropped everything and flew out as soon as possible - an invisible force pulling me to where she was. Nothing was going to be right until I saw her in person. But nothing could have prepared me for that moment, either.
I last saw my mum happy and (what I thought was) healthy in October of 2017. When I saw her again in March of 2018, she was barely conscious in a hospital bed and never recovered. I will never recover from the shock, and it breaks my heart every time I think about it. The reason why I mention this is not only because it’s a huge part of who I am - my mum was my best friend - but because it’s a huge part of my mental illness. I believe losing her shattered not only my heart, but my brain. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder shortly after she passed and have spent many many sessions of therapy addressing it - I hesitate to call it a form of PTSD because I don’t want to offend anyone who suffers with it, but it has definitely taken a LOT of work to come to terms with her loss and I am still easily triggered.
Grief never goes away - you just learn to live with it. My favorite imagery is that grief is like a cannonball in a jar - the ball itself never shrinks, but your jar gets bigger as you grow around your grief. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that - grief hits everyone at some point in their lives. But it's important to remember that not everyone grieves the same - and that's ok. 👻
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