Today is my mom’s birthday. It’s been almost five years she’s been gone from this earth. I often think of her, and I feel her with me sometimes when I go into the library or a yoga class or a coffee shop. Sometimes I’ll consciously ask her if she’d like to go with me into places. One time, when I was going into a place I didn’t want to go, and I invited her along, she emphatically told me no, that was all on me. She always lived life on her terms! I guess her death has to be on her terms as well.
Anyway, I’m one of those people who believes, “Everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes we get to learn that reason, and sometimes we don’t.
Someone I care about recently lost her mother to cancer much too young. I felt her pain so genuinely, and I hope I was able to be some comfort. I sent her a card the other day, and I just sat down and wrote out all the things to her that I needed someone to say to me when my mom died. All the things that comforted me. All the things that were true about the experience, even if they weren’t pretty. I cried the whole time I wrote it.
It was healing to me to be able to offer that comfort to someone else in a similar situation as one I’d been through. Here I sit with this laptop on what would have been my mother’s 73rd birthday, and three different friends of mine had posted on Facebook today about anniversaries, birthdays, or general thoughts on losing people they cared deeply about. I commented on each post and offered my love and hugs, and I meant it all in a way I’ll admit I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t experienced my own loss.
We all feel bad for people who experience bad things. But I know I didn’t really feel for people who had lost a parent too young until it happened to me. I haven’t lost a spouse, or a sibling, or a child. So for those who have endured that loss, I’m so sorry for you. I can sort of empathize, but I don’t truly know what you’ve gone through. But I lost a mom. I lost a mom to cancer. I lost a mom after being her sole caretaker during her illness and watching her wither away from her formerly full-of-life self. And when my friend went through that very situation, I knew.
Maybe that’s the reason. We endure terrible things so that we can truly understand what another person is going through when they have to endure the same terrible thing. And we can support them in ways that someone who hasn’t had that terrible thing happen to them cannot.
It actually just hit me today that my grandpa was younger when he died than my mom was when she died. My dad was younger when his dad died than I was when my mom died. How did this never occur to me before? As unfair as my mother’s death was, that death was more unfair, if you measure fairness in age at time of death. That loss was a terrible thing for me, but it was a terrible thing of losing a grandparent. It’s different than a terrible thing of losing a parent.
So whatever terrible thing you’ve gone through, I hope you get to learn your reason. If my reason is simply to help another human being going through the same terrible thing, maybe that’s enough. Maybe helping each other is the reason for everything in this life.
Happy birthday Mom. I know you’re still with me in some way. Thanks for eating ice cream with me today. And I understand why you declined joining me in scooping the cat litter.