A friend asked me today, "How do you get over the death of your mum?". She had just lost her grandpa a couple of months ago whom had practically brought her up. She suddenly felt very lost and alone and thought no one could understand her unless they went through it.
I told her,"You won't ever get over it. You just have to come to terms with it."
I don't think anyone ever gets over the death of a loved one. You can get over a break-up, you can get over a lost wallet, you can get over the fact you're no longer 20 or a virgin. Just not over death. What do you think? At least on my part I could never.
I guess the best remedy to healing that hole in the heart is to never try replacing it. It's like replacing your dead pet with a new one of the same breed and calling it the same name as your last one. It is only as real as the smile on a clown's face.
My road to healing was to repay her love and kindness forward. To do the things that would make her proud. To finish or in my case continue the things she wasn't able to carry on doing, like taking care of my brother. Making sure he gets the kind of love and guidance that she might have given. I am still on that road.
I would be lying if I said all these were easy. To live up to my own expectations and to understand. Even then I still cry at her grave every death anniversary and I will not miss visiting her grave on her birthday anniversaries. It is like my way of telling her and myself, "Mummy you are not forgotten".
It is important, I emphasize,to NEVER give in to your despair and dwell in it forever. Don't take the easy way out and give excuses for your bad decisions. Understand that healing takes time and rather than keeping quiet, talk to someone who has been through it, cry if you have to but do the things that would have made them happy and proud of you.
With that, I end with explaining the significance of the picture above that means so much to me. It was taken during my 21st birthday at a chinese restaurant and for that particular day in vivid memory, my mum was more eager than usual to take a picture with me. It was like she was afraid that time was running out for her and she wanted to make sure that before she left she wanted me to have the most recent picture of us together. It was somewhere in October 2005, about 5 months after we found out that she was at the last stage of lung cancer.
It was a battle she fought longer than the doctors thought she would. On November 23rd of 2006, the saddest morning of our lives, my sister, brother and I stood by her bedside as she took her last breaths. Farewells has got to be the hardest thing in life.
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