Moments

They come out of nowhere and it’s impossible to hold back the tears. I hate those moments where I relive the loss. Where my mind wonders and ends up over analyzing every last detail to the last weeks and days you were alive. There’s so many signs that we missed, so many small things that I wish I could have noticed so I could have cherished those last moments more.

Mood swings

I haven’t been able to control my emotions lately. I honestly want to blame it on the fact that I’m already a moody person to begin with, but I know it’s more than that. There’s deeper roots to what’s been fueling my fire lately. My already short temper has grown even shorter and I snap at just about anything. It’s just so hard to control how I feel when everything else seems to be falling apart too.

Just Breathe

I work at a doctors office so I know it’s impossible to avoid hearing or seeing the word cancer, but when I do it still gets me a little. Every time I’m charting and see the cancer box checked, I have to take a moment to collect myself… because that terrible disease is what turned my life upside. Usually I can take deep breaths and count to ten and be fine, but today was a different story.

Today, not only was the box checked off but written next to it was endocervical cancer… and I completely lost it. I set aside the same chart maybe five different times before I was even able to type those words…

We’re all doing our best.

They say that grief is the last act of love we have to give to those we loved. For the past three months I’ve watched my dad, whom for my entire twenty-four years of existence, go from superhuman to a shell of a man grieving the loss of his one true love. All my life he’s been the man with the answers, the one anyone and everyone would go to for help of any kind. But since the loss of mom I’ve learned a different side of him, I’ve realized even Superman has vulnerability. I’ve never seen him express so much anger, hurt, heartache, pain, or sorrow in my entire life. He’s worked aimlessly trying to find peace in the chaos that’s left behind her, but day by day I can see how tired he’s becoming.

I really wish there were something I could do to ease his pain, something I could do to bring him just an ounce of peace… but I know the truth behind that is we all have our own grieving journeys to work through. I might have lost my mom, but he lost his best friend and love of his life… that kind of loss is immeasurable.

Physical symptoms of grief

may include overwhelming tiredness & exhaustion, confusion, difficulty with concentration, sleep changes, appetite changes, nightmares, social isolation, restlessness, aches & pains, anxiety attacks, and difficultly breathing. And let me tell you something, I really do feel all of those things.

Nights are the worst

Confession: I haven’t been able to post lately because I haven’t really felt like myself. It’s been a struggle trying to get a good nights sleep, most night I’m extremely restless. I spend my nights tossing and turning until I am finally able to pass out for a couple of hours. To top it all off I’ve also been having a recurring nightmare, the small details to the dream change here and there but for the most part it all ends the same. I’m never able to save mom. The dream is me reliving the last few days/week of her life, except in my dream it’s just me and her when it gets hard. I’m never able to help her alone, she’s weak, hurting, and crying… and I’m so helpless. Subconsciously I’m always wondering why on earth God only gave me twenty-four years with her, and in my dreams I try to work out what’s I could have done differently to be able to save her. But even those dreams have turned into nightmares because saving her was beyond anyone’s control… Which leads me back to this: the hardest concepts for me to grasp is having to live the rest of my life without her.

September 29th

For the last year and a half we’ve been consumed in doctors appointments, nurse visits, chemotherapy, radiation, anything and everything that came with mom having cancer. Since she passed that busyness has been replaced with a silence that seems to be slowly consuming all of us. We’re stuck in that dark silent place, and it doesn’t seem like anyone knows what to do to get out of here.