A Year Ago Today....

My mom passed. It happened just before 3 pm this day a year ago and was as peaceful as it could have possible been. She had been so unhappy after my Dad passed and so desperately wanted to be with him, it had finally happened for her. I consoled myself with those thoughts these past weeks and months.

After Dad died, Mom never was the same. Dad was the only man she had ever been with, the only man she had ever loved, and he was her entire world. She wanted to be gone too. I never understood why I and my family, my brother and his family, and several other close friends were not enough. We, the living were still here, and yet she wanted no part of any of that. She wanted to be gone with every fiber of her being. If she could have made that happen and had been assured of being successful, she would have done it.

She tried to explain why she felt that way and tried to do so on more than one occasion. I never got it. I tried not to take it personally. Though, it did feel like a rejection. As the years passed and her grief got worse, her attitude cut deeply. Sandi, who so desperately wanted to live and was fighting setback after setback, tried to talk to her and got nowhere. My brother felt it too though being out of state he did not see it every week nor hear it every phone call as I did being here. It did not help that she was slowly losing her mental faculties and knew it and fought all of us as we tried to get her help for that and other issues.

I now sit in her house, in the same kitchen less than a foot from where I had found her after she had gone down due to a stroke and could not get up, and now totally understand where she was coming from every single day of those five years after Dad died. I now get why she felt so alone.

I now know it was not a rejection. It was never about us, the family, or anything else, but her pain. It was a grief that encompassed everything. A grief that swallows one whole.

I so get it now.

And, I really wish, I did not.