Dear ones, cancer is simply a terrible disease that changes everything. We have often reported here about fates, about fighters, about loss and grief. Today, Janina tells us how it feels to lose your mum to cancer and how overwhelming grief can sometimes be. We thank you for your trust and wish you all the best!
„The day my little boy turned 12 weeks old, my mum died. On the day that everything was supposed to get so much easier with the baby – according to all the clever books, my mum died. Just like that, on the third Advent, while I was putting the children to bed. Just like that, even though I wanted to call her when the children were asleep. Just like that, after ten years of fighting. A fight with unfair means. Against cancer. How I loathe this disease.
My mum, my sister and I were always very close. Our mother was the centre of our family. She managed everyday life with two children and a husband with a busy job just like that and lived in a country whose language she barely spoke at first. Her own mother was in England, which was a long way away back then. You didn’t just fly around the world like that.
My mum always wanted to be a grandma
So my mum lived in a small town when I was a child, where she was „exotic“ and people were afraid of contact due to the language barrier. Very few people spoke English back then. My mum hardly had any help, no support that was easy to call on. Sometimes I think she’s the only one who would understand me today when everything gets too much for me sometimes…
My mum always wanted to be a grandma. She was so happy when I got pregnant for the first time. She was so sad when we had to let our first son go at five months. She was so proud when our big son was born almost exactly a year later. But after a few months of being a happy grandma, the diagnosis came. Relapse. Metastases. Palliative. What a load of shit. Cancer is an arsehole.
But she persevered. Defied all the odds, never complained, fought like a lioness. My sister bought a house. I got married. My sister got married. I got pregnant again. My father turned 80 and me and my husband also bought a house. Our little son was born. She stuck it out – for us, to be there, to witness all these milestones. Until the very end, until there was no longer a short-term goal, until there was simply nothing left to do. Even if she never said it, I’m sure there were many moments when she would have loved to give up.
Cancer is like a time bomb
The fear and certainty of losing your mum to cancer is like nothing else. It weighs on you and weighs a tonne. You come to terms with it – in much the same way as you manage to make yourself comfortable on a ticking time bomb. You somehow learn to ignore the ticking. You only realise how heavy the burden really was the whole time when it’s over. At least then it can’t get any worse. The suffering is over, the battle fought. And lost.
A hole remains that cannot be filled. A feeling in your stomach that you can’t quite describe and that changes. Sometimes it’s shrill and painful, sometimes numb, sometimes it resembles nausea, sometimes toothache. Sometimes you think you’re going crazy. You look for signs, ask yourself how it can be that such an essential part of your existence has simply disappeared. You despair at the question of „What comes next and where do they go?“.
And then you often routinely pick up the phone to send a picture of your grandchildren or call them and tell them something. I think losing your mum is similar to what it must feel like to lose an arm and a leg. Phantom pain included. And the only person who could help you and understand you – indeed, the only person you even want to talk to about it – is no longer there.
I long for mum’s advice
Losing your mum in this special situation, when you’ve just become a mum yourself, has a very special quality of pain and suffering for me. You’re so busy and in mum chaos that you can hardly think straight. You have so many questions, no less with the second child than with the first. You are full of self-doubt and sometimes want to be a child again, lie in your mum’s lap and cry. You need encouragement that is no longer there. You can still hear her voice and know what she would say to you, but that’s not enough.
You don’t want well-meant advice from others. You’re surrounded by other children and mums – and their grandmas. You’re constantly battling the ugly feeling of envy. Every time you see grannies with their grandchildren or mums with their mums. This blind understanding, this trust. It hurts, you feel cheated. And a second later you’re distracted again, out of the pain. The baby smiles at you and beams. You forget about it for a second, just to take a photo that you immediately want to send to your sick mum to cheer her up – and then it starts all over again.
The day my little boy was 12 weeks old, my mum died. As I was on my way to bed from brushing my big son’s teeth, his little hand in mine, my phone rang. It was just before eight. It was my father. I knew what had happened before I even answered. And then came the words I had been dreading so much all those years. Time stood still. A voice I barely recognised said, „The hospital has called. Mum has just died.“ And there it was. It had happened. It had been said. The unspeakable had been said. Just like that. As if it were the most banal thing in the world.
I feel so lonely
What I didn’t know at the time was what grief felt like. How it develops. What happens to you while you’re grieving for a loved one. How you don’t even realise it for the first few months. And how the time that passes, which actually heals all wounds, is the worst part. The more time passes, the longer it’s been since I last saw her.
The last time I hugged her, so carefully, because she was so weak, just skin and bones. All the less her clothes still smelled like her. I didn’t realise how left behind you feel. How lonely many moments are, even when you’re surrounded by a thriving life that keeps you relentlessly on your toes in the form of two little boys, even if you sometimes don’t want to get up.
How much certain dates and anniversaries will get you down from now on. 9 November, for example, was always just her birthday. I never had any connection to that day other than that it was her birthday. But since 2018, it has also been the day on which a new era in my life began. Because on that day, I realised that she was going to die.
Of course, we had known for a long time that she would eventually die from the disease, but 9 November 2018 was the day I saw it with my own eyes and it hit me deep inside. It was the day we all just sat in the living room of my parents‘ house, completely helpless, watching her body fail her and her enormous mental strength slowly begin to crumble. And there was absolutely nothing we could have done about it.
My mum cried in frustration and pain
I remember that moment as clearly as if it were yesterday. How my mum could barely muster the strength to walk the few steps from her stairlift (how I hated that thing and its visualisation of illness) back to her armchair. How the sheer effort of changing rooms in her home made her cry. My mum, who never cried in front of others, who was too proud to show weakness or fear. She dragged herself around her own living room crying tears of frustration and despair.
And I remember what was going on inside me. I felt so many things at the same time. Horror, disbelief, bewilderment, deep sadness, a terrible pain, but at the same time naive hope and a kind of numbness. I simply couldn’t believe that we had reached this point. That my mum, who had fought on and on for almost a decade and defied all the odds, was now so obviously at the end.
I remember conversations about her going to the palliative care unit at the local hospital. Just to finally get the problem with the water in her legs under control, of course. Nothing to worry about. Everything would be fine. Yet it was as obvious as the proverbial pink elephant in the room that nothing was going to be fine.
I keep going back to the past
Somewhere deep inside me, underneath all the numbness and paralysis, the word „palliative care“ triggered a kind of panic attack, but I couldn’t feel it. It was buried under years of practice in ignoring it, in looking away from the fact that it was cancer. And although it was all so obvious, I only realised what had happened on 9 November when the phone rang six weeks later. When the call came. When you’re caring for a terminally ill person, it often feels like it will just go on forever. You come to terms with denying to yourself and everyone else how bad it actually is. Because you don’t have the strength to think about what if.
And then, when you have lost the person who was so close to you, who was such an elementary part of your everyday life and thoughts, you go back in your mind and replay certain moments, conversations, memories of the last few weeks before the death over and over again. And suddenly things look completely different in retrospect. And so from now on, I will always remember 9 November not only as her birthday, but also as the day I suddenly realised that she was dying.
From now on, the time between 9 November and 16 December will always be a collection of these sad memories of all the little deaths she died afterwards and all the great horrible horrors she and all of us had to endure until she was finally free. Free from pain, fear and suffering, free from this dreadful disease.
Sometimes I am so angry
More than 4 years have passed since then, with many ups and downs. In the beginning, when you had so much support and encouragement, you didn’t really need it that much. The relief that she finally no longer had to suffer was overwhelming. But as time went on, fewer and fewer people really asked. And at the same time, it suddenly became harder and harder.
Suddenly the memory is no longer dominated by the last weeks and days, by her (and our) fear, her (and our) suffering, her dwindling strength. Suddenly memories creep in, of earlier times. Of the time before cancer. Of all the disasters and little deaths she had to die on her way before she actually died. How beautiful she was. How strong she was and how proud. What a great Granny she would have been. And how much more time she should, should have had.
And again and again, there is unbridled anger and despair that she will never pick up my children from kindergarten. That my children will never run up to her, excited and bubbling over with joy, and hug her. That my children will never sleep in her bed. That she will never go on holiday with them. That she will never hear her grandchildren speak English and that she will never read them English stories. That she will never come to my aid when things get too much for me. That my children will never remember her. For my children, it will almost be as if she never existed.
It’s been over four years now. The boys are already grown up. One schoolchild and one kindergartener. The little one in particular, who was a newborn when she died, is a symbolisation of time passing. The world keeps turning. It doesn’t get easier, it gets different. But it remains damn hard. And even though motherhood demands everything from you every day, my children are my greatest comfort every day. Because even though I no longer have a mother, I can still be a mother and pass on everything my mother gave me to my two sons, who would have been her pride and joy and are my pride and joy.
