The Hurting Years

Seven years ago this week my Mom passed away, two days after her 79th birthday. Which means that tomorrow would have been her 86th.

When I was growing up, my Mom and I were very close. But during high school, after my parents divorced, something in her shifted and she left home. Not exactly the kind of leaving that never comes back. But the kind of leaving that isn’t there in any consistent, motherly way. I felt her absence in my life keenly.

As I moved into adulthood, we had some good years as well as ones that felt more strained. We were never close again like we were during my childhood, but I think somehow we settled into a comfortable, neutral place.

In those in-between years (after I was grown and before Mom came to live with me) there were moments which seemed normal and good. Moments when I caught a glimpse of the close mother/daughter connection we once had. But those times were fleeting.

But as I reflect on her life this week, I’m still amazed by her. She was a self-made woman despite all odds. She left college early because she didn’t have the money to finish, married young, and raised two daughters. Then at the age of 38, she went back to school, earning not just her bachelor’s, but a master’s degree in social work and family therapy. Eventually she established her own women’s counseling center at a major hospital which was highly successful for years. Later, when her mother began to show signs of dementia, she uprooted her life and moved four states away to help care for her. And then she began again in a new state, building a second career as a drug rehabilitation clinic supervisor.

Professionally, she was brilliant - a gifted therapist who helped so many people during her almost 40 years of family and clinical therapy. Several of the women she helped came to her funeral. I heard more than one of them say, “Your mother saved my life.”

But she struggled in her personal life, especially with her closest relationships. It always puzzled me how she could guide others through deep healing, but found it difficult to connect in healthy ways with those in her own family.

In 2015, we brought Mom back across those same four states to live with me. Her health - both mental and physical - was declining and she could no longer live on her own. It was a traumatic experience for Mom and I don’t think she ever recovered from being uprooted from her “cabin in the woods”, even though she knew it was a move she needed to make.

The last three years of her life can only be described - as anyone who’s walked this road will understand - as a nightmare. Mom was diagnosed with dementia, and there are no words that can capture the experience of the “long goodbye”. It’s especially painful when the relationship has already been complicated and challenging before dementia ever came on the scene. So much left unresolved. So much that never will be resolved….

Each day with Mom was a different version of heartbreak - a new story shaped by mental, physical and emotional challenges. To this day, I still can not think of those years without tears welling up.

When she passed away in 2018, I thought I might feel relief that her suffering was finally over. But relief never came. Instead, I was overwhelmed by a deep, lingering sorrow.

For several years after her passing, I found myself struggling each September, grappling with unexpected waves of sorrow and depression without fully understanding why. And then, one year, it hit me: my body remembers. It remembers this season of loss. The grief, the exhaustion, the sorrow that stretched on for months. And layered beneath it all were the complicated emotions I hadn’t fully named—guilt, regret and disappointment.

Now seven years later I’m able to accept, and even be grateful for, our story’s ending even if it wasn’t the ending I would have chosen. Those were the Hurting Years, but I’m thankful for them, if for no other reason than I was able to walk with Mom through her long goodbye.

Two months after she passed, while still recovering from years of suffering - both hers and mine - I wrote the following haiku.

2015-2018, The Hurting Years

     Desolations come -
     a tsunami of three years
     pounding relentless.
     A journey of tears,
     chaos, tearing hope apart,
     shredding sanity.
     Despair piles higher,
     debris scattered every way,
     desolate wasteland.
     Consolation shows
     through cracks of momentary
     light; comfort sneaks in.
     Clarity arrives
     in small doses like Red Cross;
     beacons of clear hope.