Jealous – Mum

When my foundation left me, my rocks, my confidants, my champions and biggest supporters. I was jealous, I was jealous that they had left me, left me behind to face this world that now felt cold and empty. I felt utterly alone. 
I had these huge gaps of silence, hours that would have been spent speaking with them. 

I started to hate weekends, Saturday mornings which were always spent speaking to mum, laughing, joking. Even when she was in hospital, I had a routine, 8am, i would call the nurses station as i knew they had rotated with night staff. I would ask, how is mum? did she sleep? what is her heart rate? (She had had multiple heart surgeries as they struggled to slow down her heart – resting at 150bpm on average)

Now there was silence, no calls to make, everything just STOPPED. 
I remembered as my mother was dying she had always promised me that she would always be with me, she said over and over to me in the many many days and nights I had spent by her hospital bed, “My darling daughter, I would never leave you, look in your heart and you will find me, ask me a question and I will answer you. You will always know how I will respond what I would say”

But I couldn’t feel her, I couldn’t hear her. For the first few months i dreamt of her every day, we would speak, in my dreams she wasn’t dead, it was all a mistake, the doctors had been mistaken, it was so real. Then i would wake up and re-live the pain of loosing her over and over again, morning after morning. Until one day i screamed, STOP, i cant take this! 

The dreams stopped, but with the end of the dreams came a numbness, a darkness that i cannot adequately express with words. A pain, a loss, a devastation that i did not think i could survive. 
Then the anger, the resentment, the jealousy. 

I would tell her as i cried from a place I didn’t know existed, “you promised you would still be here” “you promised that i would still be able to hear you, feel you, but i felt nothing… absolutely nothing. 

Now our usually Saturday morning girly gossip sessions with mum became the hours I spent crying, lying under my duvet, unable and unwilling to get out of bed, to shower, to brush my teeth.

The  few times the phone would ring, (its surprising how many people forget your grief once the funeral is over – life just carry’s on I guess) I would put the voice on, “i’m fine”, “just getting on with it I would say” trying to hide the shaking in my voice. As i hung up I would revert back to norm, crying until there was nothing left. 

I spent months this way, longing to be with her. 

When she died, I asked her to go, I told her I was ok, that I would be ok. She had suffered so much, physically she was a shell of who she was. Death by cancer is cruel, painful and slow. But it never took her spirit. Her grit, her determination. 

I longed to be with her, with both of them, i was jealous that they were happy without me.  

IAMCHRISTYNETTE