Preparing Yourself to Lose Someone

After my mom died, people said things to me along the lines of, “at least you knew it was coming so you had time to prepare.” I look back on this statement, because now, close to a year and a half later, I don’t feel like I was ever really prepared.

I agree that it was better to know my mom was sick and to be able to say my goodbyes to her, rather than her dying abruptly and unexpectedly. And technically I did have time to “prepare” myself. I started “preparing” myself the day I was with my mom at the doctor's office my junior year of high school when they told us they found a tumor. 

However, I keep writing “prepare” in quotation marks because I don’t think there is ever really a way to prepare yourself for the loss of a loved one. I knew it was coming, and I knew soon I would have a life without her, but it is so hard to imagine while she is still there with you.

I am no dummy. I understand science, facts, and statistics. I knew my mom’s odds were not good at all. I knew she would leave us before we would like her to. In my head, I knew all of that. But I was still not totally convinced. God had already performed so many miracles on my mom, and she had overcome so many obstacles that doctors said she would not. In my heart, I thought she was going to be the miracle. I thought she was going to be the survivor. I didn’t realize she was going to leave us when I was only 21 years old and hadn’t even graduated college yet. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know when.

The crazy thing about cancer and illness is how quickly it can progress. As I said, I knew she was going to pass, but we were not a statistics family so we wouldn’t let the doctors give us a number of “how many years she had left” etc. because we knew she would beat those odds (which she did many times). So you can prepare yourself and say she is going to die young, but when she does so well for many years, you start to think you can just live with that the rest of your life, that it’ll just be a constant battle. You don’t realize that those years that you are fighting with her and getting used to the new normal, you are also “preparing” for the sudden death. 

Yes, my mom had cancer for four years and I had four years to “prepare” for her death, but she was only really "dying" for a few weeks. During those four years, my mom was a fighter, and was still herself. She may have been a little more tired and had a chemo port implanted in her, but she was still living. It was in a matter of days that the doctors told us they couldn’t treat her anymore, and her being immobile in bed. It was in a matter of days that she wasn’t her living self anymore, but just her body struggling to fight, and then ultimately letting go. It was in a matter of days that I really lost my mom.

No matter how much time you have, whether it be four years, ten years, or three days—I don’t think there is really ever a way to prepare yourself for such a loss. Until they aren’t there with you, you can’t actually imagine what it’ll be like. You try to think of scenarios where you will miss her when she’s gone (to “prepare” yourself), but then once she is actually gone you encounter 100x as many scenarios as you ever imagined. You forgot about the simple laughs you’d have after work, the outfit you want to ask her if it looks good, or the shoulder to cry on when no one else is there. You won’t fathom what the loss will be like until you actually experience it. There's never a way to ever fully prepare yourself.