Preparing to Lose It All
Trigger Warning: This ritual in writing contains moments leading up to the passing of my mother. If you are still grieving or have grieved a parent transitioning, please know it is okay to skip reading this one to care for yourself if that is what you need.
Having grown up in the church, I was conditioned intimately with “sacrifice” and “persecution”. From my experience in Christianity, we were often told through preaching, bible studies and even music to remain humble, lowly like Jesus, even being unworthy or undeserving of the gift of salvation, to not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to, or simply put in my grandmothers words, “Don’t get bigger than ya britches!” Now when Grandma or an elder said it, it primarily was a forewarning of a whooping to come, either way you knew you were being prepared to lose. In 2012 as I was moving through life in my mid-20’s, it was not surprising that I would experience some of the biggest tests of faith and challenges to my spiritual beliefs. At the time, my family was attending a church that was known to preach “prosperity gospel” and for the time being, I needed to be at that church and learn lessons about a relationship with God to activate my faith in and relationship and not the “wrath’’ or "vengeance” which was what I was more familiar with.
The year started off quite interesting. I was volunteer/working for one of the Assistant Pastors as one of his three executive assistants. My husband was still deployed somewhere in the sands and I was active duty-ish in the Air Force preparing folks to deploy and finishing upgrade training. We were supposed to enjoy a vacation to the mountains once he returned and my mom and sister were coming down to look at the area and for jobs to consider moving down south. Oh not to forget, one of my older sisters was getting married while I was fighting custody for my nieces and nephews, states away. In short, I was busy and had plenty on my plate to do.
I remembered my word for the year being ‘freedom’ and I was not exactly sure what that meant but I was open to whatever freedom meant. All of the plans happened just as they should and my mom and sister flew back home. When my mom got home and called me, the first words out of her mouth (of course after, we made it home) was “to pray for your womb.” At this time, I was the only one of my siblings (besides baby sister) that did not have any children and for the moment, I was fine with that although my husband and I were discussing growing our family of two. Maybe a week later, I took a home pregnancy test and waited for the results. My husband looked at it and confirmed we were pregnant!
Fast forward six months and I am full blown pregnant and working 12-hour shifts. My mom and baby sister have moved in with us but my mothers cancer has cause complications to her health while I am working trying to deploy 215 people to the desert. Pregnancy, especially my first one was really hard on me so I admit I was not the most pleasant person to be around, especially at home. I remembered giving myself small timelines of just making it to this date, and then making it to the deployment date, then making it to November. And then November came and I remember being upset because I couldn’t understand why my mom was so adament about throwing me a baby shower. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed and hearing Spirit say, “There are people that have lost their mothers and wish they could have a baby shower and here you are being mean to yours.” So I gave in and let my mom throw me a baby shower.
The day after my baby shower, my mom was hospitalized and 3 days later I was put on bed rest for a week but nothing was going to keep me from visiting and seeing my mom. We talked a bit during that time and reviewed her finances and life insurance policies. I heard the doctors discuss what they were doing for her treatment and how there was no cure for what she was facing, although he also never said her condition was life threatening. Later that week, she was released from the hospital and I remembered her telling me she wasn’t ready to die yet. Now in hindsight I don’t know if my response to her was out of faith or stubbornness but I told her, “It wasn’t her time yet. God still had too much he wanted to do through her.”
One week from taking my mom home from the hospital and me saying those words to her, she transitioned from this side. Devastated was not even the word and yet, I felt like I did not even have time to grieve because we got orders to Hawaii, I was working and pregnant, my little sister was living with me and then I needed to be strong to handle my mothers arrangements and support our extended family. In the moment, losing my mother was the biggest and most hardest life challenge I ever had to face and the second ‘marriage’ defining moment. What I didn’t know was this was the beginning to a season of loss.