My life will never be the same without mom

I loss my mom suddenly because of high blood pressure last month, May 10 and it's on mother's day. I greeted her in advance on May 9 and I'm looking forward to have a video call with her after my work on May 10, but I never got the chance anymore because she was rushed to the hospital and God took her home. Me and my family is very close to each other. My mom is also my best friend. I love her so much and it's my greatest fear to loss her in my life and now it happened. I miss her so much, I always think about her day and night and I can't believe that we will not see her anymore in this life. My mom has a high blood pressure sometimes and also high blood sugar. Sometimes my mom and my father will go the nearest pharmacy to check their blood sugar and I'm not sure if she's checking also her blood pressure at the same time. She's taking some medicines but usually she will take it only if she's not feeling well. And whenever she was told to maintain taking her medicines, she will jokingly say if it's time to die, it's time. I never thought we will loss her suddenly as she seems healthy and strong. She actively do the household chores and she's a happy person. I am working abroad and was able to spent time with my family on my vacation last 3 months ago before my mom passed away. It's so painful that I wasn't able to see her again for the last time because of the lockdown. I am struggling with so much negative thoughts and some regrets thinking I should have done something like buying her the device kit for monitoring her blood pressure and blood sugar. Whenever I saw this device kit on the market, I was thinking to buy it but ended up buying other stuffs for them instead to bring it on my vacation. I should have check with my mom more about her health. I am so broken. This negative thoughts and regrets is consuming me instead of remembering all the many happy memories with my mom. I am posting this here as I don't have an outlet to express how I feel. I cannot tell my family as I don't want them to worry about me. I am the eldest among 5 siblings. We are all in shocked and in so much pain. I am encouraging my siblings to be strong especially for our dad. I really feel so weak that I can barely breathe whenever the negative thoughts and regrets attacked me. Our life will never be the same without mom.

 

Naz,
Let me say how sorry I am for the loss of your Mom, and on mother’s Day! I’m so sorry. I can feel your pain as I read your post. I know you miss your Mom so much. It’s so hard to lose our parents, they’re a part of us, and we feel we’ll have them forever. I know that’s how I felt when I lost each of my parents. I lost my Dad to cancer, I thought he was a super hero, the strongest man alive who knew everything, how can I live without him. I took care of my Mom after he passed, she was my best friend and we did everything together. Then I lost her too, she had heart surgery that gave her dementia. Both these losses were long ago but I understand how it feels to lose a parent. It’s devastating.
You’re putting guilt on yourself, for no good reason. You did nothing wrong. You loved your Mom with all your heart and she knew that. Afraid we all tend to feel guilt after we lose someone we love so much. I’m on this site because I lost my husband to a massive heart attack. He was taken from me in 2 hours, and he had no health issues at all. I felt guilt too,did I miss signs. I had recently thrown out our aspirin so I couldn’t give him any while it was happening. He yelled I love Robin while waiting to get wheeled into the ambulance, yelled many times, at least 5. I didn’t answer him. That bothers me so much. I thought he would be coming back home. But I have this guilt, and I know I shouldn’t. He knew I loved him, I didn’t need to say it, but I really wish I did.
You lost your Mom so recently, with time all those wonderful memories will make you smile. It takes time. This pandemic really has added another layer of torture making everything even worse. Difficult to receive support and give support to your Dad and siblings. It is nice that you have each to
Your Mom helped make you what you are today, she will always be with you in your heart and through memories.
Take one day at a time or one moment at a time. Don’t push yourself, most things can wait. And keep posting and reading other people’s stories, it’s very helpful.
There will be better days ahead, keep working towards them.
Robin

 

Naz,
I hear you and i understand. My mom passed one year ago on May 13 2019 from heart failure. I witnessed the death and it was very horrifying seeing her unable to breath and thrashing her head from side to side before she stopped and was gone. it was a shock for me because she was getting better from her stroke and i had come to hospital that day to take her home as i had been promised by the doctor the previous day. For a long time, one year to be exact, I was out of my mind with the image of her dying moment and all my bad decisions flooding my mind every free moment, which was plenty free time after the lock-down situation. I was analyzing all my decisions and found many many bad decisions i made ( I was her caretaker). It was so bad that at one point i wanted to stop my blood pressure medicine so i would also die to stop the pain. But then the thought of my family having to go through the same pain i was feeling made me decide not to. Instead i decided i would just exist. I was completely disinterested in life. I did not envisage being happy ever again.

I came to this site and it has been a lifesaver. Reading others experiences I realized i was not alone. Others feel the same deep pain as me. I found much comfort when people describe their experiences and they are very similar to mine, down to the guilt and trauma. I read that we shall move past the guilt and trauma to the happy memories one day. that we shall be happy again one day. For me the glimpse of light came at around the one year mark. In 2010, a friend had told me of an amazing experience when he died 15 minutes during surgery before successful resuscitation. He was just a good guy and agnostic. He said he saw a being of light that exuded the most amazing feeling of love which cannot be described using words. he said rainbow colors were floating and he was trying to catch them when suddenly and he woke up in the ICU. As a non religious person, he wanted to know if my religion could explain who that being was. As a christian, i told him i thought it was Jesus. So one year after mums' death, I started to think of this experience and thought maybe our loved ones are not really dead, they are just someplace else, and they are happy and free of the pain. That they are not mad at us for our failures but infact are waiting for us to join them when its our time. Slowly i started to accept these thoughts as true. Although the horrible feelings of having failed her and the despondency and great tragedy that accompanied it still came to my mind frequently especially upon waking up, they didn't stay too long nor were they too strong as i remembered she's just in the next realm, happy and free and i too will go there when my time comes. Finally after one year, i feel free to miss my mom. I don't feel ready to visit the good memories yet as its still too painful to think we wont share more memories here on earth. For now I am happy to finally just miss her without all the extra weight.

Naz, I hope from my experience you can see that you are not alone. I now believe that we are not guilty because we didn't do anything intentionally to cause the death of our loved ones. If we knew what we know now, we could have acted differently in a blink of an eye. But we didn't know. We did our best according to our understanding and our knowledge of the situation at the time. You didn't get the pressure and diabetes machine because you didn't think there was anything out of the ordinary happening. if you knew i am sure you would have bought the machines immediately and do all you can to save her life. Same to me. I was blissfully unaware of the gravity of my mother heart condition and so i didn't take her to the heart specialist. If i knew of course i would have taken her immediately. So dear Naz, feel the loss, but try to remind yourself that they are not mad at you where they are, and you are not, in the truest sense of the word, guilty of any wrongdoing.

It is OK and natural to feel sad. Come here often and read others experiences. It really helped me release the guilt and know there are others in the exact same place as me.
Kaptu.

 

Dear Robin,

I feel so sorry for your loss too. Thank you so much and I appreciate your kind and comforting messages as I also read some of your replies in the forum. My mom was 51 years old. I was there with my family when we celebrated her birthday last January. I never thought that would be the last. Really life is so short and uncertain. I thank God for the strength He is giving to all of us as this pain we are feeling of losing our loved ones is so unbearable.
God bless you.

 

Dear Kaptu,

I was deeply moved by your message. While I'm reading it, it helped me get back to my senses. I never run out of negative thoughts. I feel my mind will burst out everytime I am trying to figure out things on my own. I'm a Christian too and I believed all what you have said is true. The day I loss my mom, I really wanted to ask God why but I controlled myself because who am I to question Him. We owe our life to God. But as the days go by, I wonder maybe if I ask God, He will give me an answer right away so I asked Him why. Sadly I don't get the answer but I felt that He gave me the grace to patiently wait for the answer to my question. And if we don't get the answer, maybe it's because some things are just beyond human understanding and all we can do is to trust Him.

Thank you so much Kaptu. I feel that God is using you to speak to me in a very kind and understandable way. God bless you.

 

Dear Naz,
I am so glad that my experience resonated with you. I recognized myself in your original post, how you were analyzing everything over and over again. I also recognize myself in the questioning God part. I did that too, not initially but after some weeks. I was even sometimes angry with God coz how could he not answer our prayers. we prayed so hard as a family for 8 months straight, even the children. When she died the children were wailing and so confused about God. Their child like faith was crushed that day. I too was so confused. I don't have the answer to this day. I still sometimes get angry but the word trust always manages to pop up in my mind and i stop. I remind myself that God wants us to trust him in all circumstances, and if there was a time to do that it is now.

Naz, the last one year, i felt myself in a free fall, trying to clutch at anything to break the fall. Trying to understand, wanting it not to be my fault and thinking so many things to counteract the feelings that it was my fault and mine only. That i could have prevented it. I so wanted it not to be my fault. My mind was racing constantly, some thoughts pointing out how it was all my fault, some thoughts pointing why it could not be my fault. I thought of her pain and how that was my fault too. I thought of how the family is shattered, my father especially and how all that was my fault, my carelessness. I cried constantly when assailed by these thoughts. I was so restless. Sometimes had to just drive around aimlessly to try and find some peaceful moment of rest from these thoughts.

Reflecting on those horrible times one year on, i think it was the free fall happening. The mind is trying to save us from the free fall. We are thinking this and that hoping we will find the answer that will settle everything and free us from the pain. That will make us stop the free fall. That will say to us, you see, it is OK with you, you are not at fault and everything is OK with the one that left us and we can be OK also. Our mind is trying to deliver us from the painful moment we are in. I think it is the job of the mind to do that. It is like a surgery, very painful but necessary to remove the bad thing inside. I think those thoughts have to find an outlet and be released. I recommend writing them down as you think these thoughts, or talking them over with someone who has gone through it (I recommend talking to only those who have gone through it otherwise you will feel worse when others expect you to get over it), come in this site and write out them, keep a notebook with you all the time. Write every thought down, good, bad, the thoughts blaming yourself and why you are blaming yourself, your fears now that your mom has crossed over, your hopes, your pain.... all of it... release the thoughts as they come, slowly by slowly, one day or one moment at a time. One day you will have released enough negative thoughts that enough room will be freed in your mind for the good thoughts to begin to emerge and make their way slowly into your mind. For me, it started after one year. My friends amazing near death experienced landed in my mind out of the blue, to be followed soon by another good of 'hey she could be deliriously happy where she is now'. I thought it is really not so hopeless as it seemed. I thought if she's happy, does it matter whose fault it was. We shall go to them (Kind David in the bible said this also when his son died). From there other good thoughts came. The negative ones came too. They dueled in my mind. But it is no longer a walk over for the negative thoughts. The good thoughts are delivering serious blows too.

Dear Naz, may the Lord keep you, may he comfort you and may his peace come upon you. God bless you.
Forgive me if I write in a long rambling way. I think it is how the heart writes. The heart gets impatient with grammar and prose sometimes.. but another heart will get it.
Kaptu.

 

Dear Kaptu,

Thank you so much for taking your time to write to me. Knowing that someone here understands me is really a big help for me. I became distant with my friends and relatives and even at work. I just get annoyed when someone is asking "how are you?" even I know they are just concerned. But of course when I'm at work and talking to client, I will say I'm fine because they don't know about me. How can I say this when deep inside my heart I am not fine and I will never be fine because my mom is not here with us anymore, but I need to be strong for my dad and my siblings. I miss my mom so much. A friend told me and it comforts me when she said, "your mom may have gone but you've gained an angel in heaven watching over you". We may not see our mom physically but I believed they are with the Lord in heaven guiding us all the time.

There is one song that is so special to me now. Last valentines day, my mom sang this with my dad. When I listen to it, I just feel that it's what my mom wants to tell us specially when we misses her so much. Allow me to share the song here as I believed this is what your mom wants to tell you too.

 

Thank you so much Naz. The song is very touching. God bless you as journey through this pain.
Kaptu

 

Hi Robin.Such good advice.I too am trapped in the 'could haves' etc.,regrets. I'mean finally realising,after mths. Of beating myself up, that probably all of us have some sort of regret,after a loved one passes.I feel the reason being is we are human.We are not perfect.It might take our loved ones death to realise we could have done some things differently or better. We did our best in our individual,unique circumstances. I was my grandparents and Mother's caregiver. The irony is,that if we had it all to do again,I bet we would almost repeat whatever we did.There's,a reason for most things.
In the end,Robin,they knew how much we loved them.And,for me,the best way to get through any regrets,or guilt,whilet we cared for them,is to remember all we did do for them,out of pure love. And,promise yourself,to always griw,and do better throughout your life.××

 

Hi Kaptu.Beautiful words of wisdom.I can really relate to what you wrote to Naz.Love is all.××

 

Thank you, I think we all tend to go down that path of guilt or questioning if we did everything possible. We don’t want our loved ones gone, so we keep feeling we missed something. But as you mention, we would most likely do everything the same if we had to do it again. For me, all I had was 2 hours, so I started thinking was there anything we missed up to that day. But in my heart I know, there were no signs. None of us should beat ourselves up or question, it just seems to be the natural way our minds go. But shouldn’t.
I agree, our loved ones knew how much we loved them. There’s no question. And they want us to be ok. Ron is my inspiration in everything I do, and I want him to proud.
All the best!

 

My Mom and beautiful deceased loved ones inspire me too,but the last 9th mths.,the sadness and grief keeps overriding me moving forward.For my sake, (and theirs),this has to change.

 

Yes, you do need to do your best to change that somehow. For me, what helps the best is to stay busy, as the weather turns warm I’m outside doing yard work. That keeps my mind active I’ve made a memorial garden for my husband, just finished a couple days ago. I will keep working on it though. It will be my go to place to work and to sit in a quiet calm place. Find something you enjoy and try to use that to push forward, get your blood flowing. If I feel I’m doing something for Ron, it helps my motivation.
I don’t know your story and how long since your loss, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all different. But do keep pushing forward, and eventually things will be a little easier. I’m still healing, but I’m in a better place then I had been. Give yourself time.