My Mom Died of Cancer When My Baby Was 12 Weeks Old. I Miss Her.

Dear readers, cancer is just a terrible disease that changes everything. We've written here many times about people's stories, about fighters, about loss and grief. Today Janina tells us what it feels like to lose your own mother to cancer, and how overwhelming the grief can get. Janina, thank you for trusting us. We're sending you all our love!

“On the day my little boy turned 12 weeks old, my mom died. On the day when everything with the baby was supposed to get so much easier, at least according to all the smart books, my mom died. Just like that, on the third Sunday of Advent, while I was putting the kids to bed. Just like that, even though I was going to call her once the kids were asleep. Just like that, after ten years of fighting. A fight that didn't play fair. Against cancer. How I hate this disease.

My mom, my sister, and I were always very close. Our mother was the center of our family. She kept everyday life running with two kids and a husband whose job demanded everything, and she did it in a country whose language she barely spoke at first. Her own mother was in England, which felt far away back then. People didn't just hop on a plane.

My mom always wanted to be a grandma

So during my childhood, my mom lived in a small town where she was “exotic” and where people, put off by the language barrier, kept their distance. Hardly anyone spoke English back then. My mom had almost no help, no one she could simply call on. Sometimes I think she's the only person who would understand me now, when everything gets to be too much…

My mom always wanted to be a grandma. She was so happy when I got pregnant the first time. She was so sad when we had to let our first son go in my fifth month. She was so proud when, almost exactly a year later, our older son was born. But after just a few months as a happy grandma, the diagnosis came. Relapse. Metastases. Palliative care. What a load of crap. Cancer is an asshole.

But she hung on. She defied 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. My husband and I bought a house too. Our little son was born. She hung on for us, to be there, to see all these milestones. Until the very end, until there was no short-term goal left, until nothing was possible anymore. Even though she never said it, I'm sure there were many moments when she would have loved to give up.

Cancer is like a ticking time bomb

The fear, and at the same time the certainty, that you're going to lose your mother to cancer is like nothing else. It weighs on you. It weighs a ton. You learn to live with it, kind of like getting comfortable on a ticking time bomb. Somehow you learn to ignore the ticking. How heavy the weight really was the whole time, you only grasp once it's over. At least it can't get any worse after that. The suffering is over, the fight has been fought. And lost.

What's left is a hole that can't be filled. A feeling in your stomach that you can't quite describe, and that keeps changing. Sometimes it's shrill and painful, sometimes numb, sometimes it's like nausea, sometimes like a toothache. Sometimes you think you're losing your mind. You look for signs and wonder how it's possible that such an essential part of your existence is just gone. You despair over the question of “What comes next, and where do they go?”

And out of habit, you still reach for the phone to send a picture of the grandkids, or to call and tell her something. Losing your mother is a lot like losing an arm and a leg, I think. Phantom pain included. And the one person who could help you, who could understand you, the only one you'd even want to talk to about this, is gone.

I long for my mom's advice

Losing your own mother right when you've just become a mother yourself has a whole extra kind of pain and suffering, at least for me. You're so busy and deep in the mom chaos that you can barely form a clear thought. You have so many questions, no fewer with the second child than with the first. You're full of self-doubt, and sometimes you wish you could be a kid again, curl up in your mom's lap and cry it out. You need reassurance that doesn't exist anymore. You can still hear her voice and you know what she'd say, but it's not enough.

You don't want well-meaning advice from other people. You're surrounded by other kids and moms, and their grandmas. You're constantly fighting an ugly feeling of envy. Every time you see grandmas with their grandkids, or moms with their moms. That instinctive understanding, that trust. It hurts, and you feel cheated. And a second later you're distracted again, out of the pain. The baby is laughing at you, beaming. You forget for a second, just long enough to snap a photo that you immediately want to send to your sick mother to cheer her up. And then it all starts over again.

On the day my little boy was 12 weeks old, my mom died. I was walking my older son to bed after brushing his teeth, his little hand in mine, when my phone rang. It was just before eight. My dad. Before I even answered, I already knew what had happened. And then came the words I had dreaded for all those years. Time stood still. A voice I barely recognized said, “The hospital called. Mom just died.” And there it was. It had happened. It had been said out loud. The unspeakable had been spoken. Just like that. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. 

I feel so alone

What I didn't know back then was what grief feels like. How it develops. What happens to you while you mourn someone you love. How you don't really grasp it at all for the first few months. And how the passing of time, which supposedly heals all wounds, turns out to be the worst part. The more time goes by, the longer it's been since I last saw her.

Since I last hugged her, so carefully, because she was so weak, nothing but skin and bones. The less her clothes smell like her. I didn't know how left behind you can feel. How lonely so many moments are, even when you're surrounded by life in full bloom, which keeps you on your toes, relentlessly, in the form of two little boys, even when sometimes you'd rather not get out of bed.

How much certain dates and anniversaries will wear me down from now on. November 9, for example, was always just her birthday. I never had any other connection to that day. But since 2018, it's also the day a new way of counting time began in my life. Because on that day, I realized she was going to die.

Of course we had known for a long time that she would eventually die of the disease. But November 9, 2018 was the day I saw it with my own eyes and it hit me deep in my core. It was the day we all 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 left that we could have done about it.

My mom cried from frustration and pain

I remember that moment so clearly, as if it were yesterday. How my mom could barely find the strength to walk the few steps from her stairlift (how I hated that thing and the way it made her illness so visible) back to her armchair. How the sheer effort of moving from one room to another in her own home brought her to tears. My mom, who never cried in front of other people, who was too proud to show weakness or fear. She dragged herself through her own living room and cried tears of frustration and despair.

And I remember what was going on inside me. I felt so many things at once. Horror, disbelief, shock, deep grief, terrible pain, but also naive hope and a kind of numbness. I simply couldn't believe we had gotten to this point. That my mom, who for almost a decade had kept fighting and beaten the odds again and again, 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 fluid in her legs under control, of course. Nothing to worry about. Everything would be fine.  Even though it was as plain as the elephant in the room that nothing was going to be fine.

I keep going back to the past

Somewhere deep inside me, under all the numbness and paralysis, the word “palliative” set off a kind of panic attack, but I couldn't feel it. It was buried under years of practice at ignoring, at looking past the fact that she was dying of cancer. And even though it was all so obvious, I only realized what had happened on that November 9 when the phone rang six weeks later. When the call came. When you're caring for someone who is terminally ill, it often feels like it will just go on like this forever. You learn to live with it by denying, to yourself and everyone else, how bad it really is. Because you don't have the strength to think about what if.

And then, once you've lost the person who was so close to you, who was such a basic part of your daily life and thoughts, you go back in your mind and replay certain moments, conversations, memories from the last weeks before the death. Again and again. And suddenly, in hindsight, things look completely different. So from now on, I'll always remember November 9 not just as her birthday, but also as the day I suddenly realized she was dying.

The time between November 9 and December 16 will always be a collection of these sad memories now, of all the small deaths she died after that, and all the big, horrifying things she and the rest of us still had to endure until she was finally free. Free of pain, fear, and suffering, free of this horrible disease. 

Sometimes I'm so angry

More than four years have passed now, with a lot of ups and downs. At first, when you get so much support and kindness, you don't actually need it all that much yet. The relief that she didn't have to suffer anymore was still overwhelming. But over time, fewer and fewer people really ask how you're doing. And at the same time, it suddenly gets harder and harder.

Suddenly the memories are no longer dominated by the last weeks and days, by her fear (and ours), her suffering (and ours), her fading strength. Suddenly memories creep in from before. From the time before the cancer. Before all the catastrophes and small deaths she had to die along the way before she actually died. How beautiful she was. How strong and how proud. What a wonderful Granny she would have been. And how much more time she should have had, had to have.

And again and again, there's this wild anger and despair that she will never pick my kids up from preschool. That my kids will never run toward her, excited and bursting with joy, and throw their arms around her. That my kids will never sleep in her bed. That she'll never take them on vacation. That she'll never hear her grandsons speak English, and never read them stories in English. That she'll never rush to help me when everything gets to be too much. That my kids won't remember her. For my kids, it will be almost as if she never existed.

It's been more than four years now. The boys are big already. One in elementary school and one in preschool. The little one especially, who was a newborn when she died, is a living reminder of how time passes. The world keeps turning. It doesn't get easier, it gets different. But it's still damn hard. And even though motherhood demands everything from you every single day, my kids are my greatest comfort every day. Because even if I no longer have a mother, I still get to be one, and I get to pass on everything my mom gave me to my two sons, who would have been her pride and joy and are mine.”