I am a mother and a bereaved mother. While I am accepting of my newly bereaved identity, I prefer for the mother and the bereaved mother in me to exist apart. Split personalities. A notable change in my behavior when one takes over the other, and yet traits of one personality bleed into the other. One pushes the other aside in an effort to take center stage.
The mother side tries to assuage the fears brewing in the bereaved mother, and briefly they overlap, although I try to be only one or the other.
Staving off the bereaved mother means not allowing her to interfere with me and my living children. She can be such a nuisance. My children shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden that she has become. I allow her to shine for only moments here and there. Moments the mother in me has deemed as an acceptable time for her to emerge.
Other times, when bereaved Mama has crossed a healthy boundary, I keep her a secret, locked behind a closed bathroom door. “Mama will be right out!” I say to my kids who immediately begin asking for me the second the door closes. Bereaved Mama is having a good cry on the toilet. My living children are playing blissfully. Keeping bereaved Mama locked behind a door feels like less of a detriment at times.
When I can, I save the bereaved side of myself for June, the baby I lost to cancer nearly two years ago, and June alone. But again, parts of her overlap with the mother in me. She takes over and I can’t hide her from my children. “Mama, why are you crying?” my oldest daughter asks. I don’t lie because I’ve taught my children that lying is as sinful as it gets when you’re five. “I’m thinking about June,” I tell her.
I mother my children in front of me as they exist. I love them. I bathe them. I feed them when they are hungry. When they grow tired, I scoop them into my arms and carry them upstairs to bed. I am their mother. I was not born with children, but I was born a mother. The mother in me has always existed innately.
When my first daughter was born she pulled the mother in me to the surface. I quickly came to realize that my future self, the mother, had always lived dormant inside of my cells. How else would I have known to be a mother?
The ingredients to my future children had been stored in my ova from the day I was born, awaiting their other half of ingredients to form an embryo. To become the children I now know.
It’s as if the mother in me always existed alongside my unborn children. It’s as if we have always been together. This feeling doesn’t disappear when your daughter dies.
June is no longer here because the cancer took her. She no longer tells me when she’s hungry, or gives me cues as to when she wants to sleep. I am no longer on the receiving end of June’s smile as she splashes water in the bath. I can no longer feel the warmth of her body, as I once did when she lay in my lap. And yet, I am still June’s mother.
The only way I know to continue on with life is to be both my living children’s mother and June’s bereaved Mama. Both personalities must exist. There is no timeline associated with the definition of bereaved. I consider this new personality may never go away. For that, I am broken, but grateful.
What becomes of a mother after her child dies? I wonder, as if I am not her, she is not me. As if time does not exist. As if June were still alive.
It’s my God-given right to mother my children, I think. I am June‘s mother. After I die, I will still be June’s mother. I was not born knowing how to fulfill this role of being June’s bereaved mother, but I also wasn’t born knowing exactly how to be a mother at all.
In practicing my new, bereaved role, I’ve come to see that my life’s purpose is wrapped in the death of June. It has been sitting in my lap since the day she died. For a while, grief obscured it.
I’ve been cradling it for nearly two years, unsure of what to do with it. What’s inside? I wonder. I don’t have to know in order to know it’s a gift I will cherish for the rest of my life. One I can share with others. I know others, too, will feel the ripple of the gift June left. Just recently, I’ve realized what the gift is. Meaning and purpose are what I am carefully extracting from June’s life and our family’s experience of having June be a part of ours. It’s the only way to keep on living.
Like a surgeon removing bullets from an oozing abdominal wound, I carefully extract the meaning and purpose of June’s life from my broken heart. It’s buried and I must dig. It’s hidden and mysterious. Obstacles interfere with the extraction. I can’t clearly see what I am doing, but I know I need to take it out, hold it, admire it, and love it. If I don’t, it will spoil, and it will make me sick. Poisoning me from the inside out, just as overlooked bullets poison a patient’s body. I must find and remove every bit of the meaning, or else, I too, will die.
Unlike the person laying on the table who needs the bullets removed, I don’t have a physical wound from the outside looking in. There are no holes that make you privy to what’s happening to my heart, or my abdominal cavity. You don’t get to take a sneak peak at my insides to see how much I am hurting.
“You’re not going to give up, are you?” (I have been asked this before).
“No, not today,” I respond. I have work to do. There is awareness needing to be spread. There are too many people unaffected by June’s death. Don’t you know that our children are dying? Don’t you know, June is dead?
Resignation would demand an end to extraction. Does a surgeon stop operating when he thinks he’s done, or does he put his instruments down when all of the bullets are indeed removed, dropped into a metal bowl, counted, and recounted? For me to resume is to honor June, every day.
The innate being inside of me tells me to write. Extricate the meaning to survive. It tells me to tell the world about June. The voice inside tells me the gift of purpose is best handled by being seen. It’s a door itself that opens to a community of people suffering in isolation because their child has also died of cancer. If I let myself be seen, maybe in turn, they will reveal themselves to me.
How do we resign when we have purpose? I’ve learned, it’s not as easy nor desirable. Therefore, I must honor the most meaningful gift anyone has ever given me. To give up is to give up in vain. There exist one million excuses as to why I should give up, let go, and move on. Moving on would be to leave the bullets in the patient’s body and sew it up.
The surgeon does not work alone to remove the bullets. There are nurses, anesthesiologists, and surgical technologists. I must also gather my team. This type of work should not be done alone.
I am in the process of identifying my team and drawing them in. June is the leader. She’s the person I report to every morning, and the one who breathes life into every word I write.
The most valuable role of the people around me is to support me when I feel like giving up. The person who continually stays by my side and cheers me on. The person who acknowledges that although time has passed, the wound is no smaller. The pain is no less. The person who acknowledges that with each passing day something grows from the wound. The fruit of the extraction becomes bigger. The person who recognizes that I am still June’s mother and who sees bereaved Mama in me.