Work / Life Losses

Why are our children growing up so fast? Do they have to? Why? Is it because we have lost sight of what it is like to be a child? To run free, let their imaginations run wild and just play. Was a child’s innocence taken away w/911, predators on the loose, both parents working, the media, the clothes on the racks, playgrounds gone, pressure to succeed ( whatever that means to a child), adult fear?

So much lost…how can we secure childhood for our children? We need to help them for as long as we can.  How? Creating safe neighborhoods, share parenting responsibilities, stop buying the clothes on the racks and petition for more age appropriate clothing, become a resilient family/neighborhood.

It’s interesting when you are an adult and friends’ mothers want to adopt you or…maybe you want them to adopt you. I think it might be a little of both. There really is something about mothers. I think it is because they carried you for 9 months and a special bond was created right from the start.

This situation of adoption happened after my aunt and uncle died. I had them for awhile after my mother died and they had always been my adopted parents even when I was little…but that is another story.

So I was adopted by three wonderful mothers. They made sure that I was OK and that my birthday was remembered and I alway received a card on holidays. They included me in events that they knew I would attend. Only specific events, for certain family members. They knew me so well and knew my issues with traditions. One even attended my graduate school graduation.

One has died and one is very sick and the other is 91 and always writes letters to me.

These lovely women knew they couldn’t replace my own mother and they never tried. What they did do for me is love me, understand my silence, and my need to be by myself at times. They had this innate ability to just know when to be in my life and when it was OK for me to not connect, like Mother’s Day. It was OK for me to connect the next day or the day before. I would always send cards for mother’s day, but not mother’s day cards.

I thank my friends for letting me share their mothers with me. They all knew that my relationship with their mothers was special and that their mothers’ relationships with me was special too.

Did I have any? I suppose I had some, like taking my mother on a trip rather than traveling the world sitting on a couch. Or spending a little more time with my brother. I worked hard in life to not have regrets. I couldn’t think of spending my life saying, ” I should have” or “I wished I had not done that” or ” I wished I had done”. I know so many people who have so many regrets…that is all they talk about and it never seems to go away. It is so painful to watch.

I guess my biggest regret was not taking my mother home from the doctor’s office instead of admitting her to the hospital. On this day, she was at her best, she could breath better, was more comfortable, had more energy and I thought this would be a quick trip to the doctor’s and she would come home to celebrate valentine’s day. How wrong I was. The doctor performed some tests, including a chest x-ray. The results of the chest x-ray were not good. My mother had bilateral pleural effusion and needed to be admitted to have chest tubes placed. This would make her breathing easier and make her more comfortable. I had to talk my mother into going into the hospital. She did not want to be admitted, she wanted to go home. I convinced her that the sooner she had the chest tubes in , the sooner she would be able to come home and she would be able to see spring arrive…she loved spring.

Three days later, my mother died in the hospital. The regret is that if I had taken her home, she would have been where she wanted to be.

After my brother died in Vietnam ( his second tour of duty), my parents were saddened beyond belief and were incapable of being involved in the planning of his funeral. They were being hounded by awful phone calls about the stupidity of the war and how could they let their son go off to war…etc. So the funeral arrangements were my responsibility. Throughout the entire funeral, which still people comment today about how emotional my brother’s funeral was, the thing that hounded me and actually distracted from the overwhelming sadness was that I was never going to be an aunt.

These are some of the unexpected things you think about when you have lost your siblings. I not only had to deal with the loss of a beloved brother but also the loss of ever having nieces and nephews. This seemed unbearable to me. I will never be an aunt became a constant thought for many years. A sad, very sad thought. Almost an interfering thought. Today, I do not have the intense feelings around the thought as I once had for many years. Why? Time and a friend letting me say, “I will never be an aunt” a thousand times . I also had to ignore individuals who would say, ” it is no big deal” ( I think to make me feel better, it only made me feel worse) and realize that it will never happen and I have no control over it. Death is final and it will not change.

I still envy people who are aunts and uncles, but I don’t have that intense feeling of loss. I just look at them, smile and wonder if they know how lucky they are. If I have the opportunity, I tell them.

It’s really amazing how the mind works! After each death in my family occured, the same feelings or bad moods would occur. For example, the first year that my bother died, I would begin to get in a bad mood three or four days prior to the date my brother died, the date we heard he had died ( that happened to be the day before Mother’s Day and her birthday as well), then the day his body arrived home, then the dates of his funeral and burial, and then his birthday. I would never realize why I was feeling the way I was feeling and then I would either be writing the date or ask someone what date it was and I would realize what was happening to me.

This happened for years. Then my father, then my mother and all of their dates of…I spent a good part of several months and days every year feeling sad, in a bad mood, or just lonely. The death days, the funeral and burial days, the birthdays, the anniversaries, mother’s day, father’s day and holidays spread over several months and days. Then there were special events that lacked the presence of family. It was an interesting several years. I spent time apologizing to friends about my unique behaviors, but after awhile they began to realize that an anniversary must be coming up or a birthday.

I cannot tell you exactly when the bad moods, sadness or loneliness ceased. Maybe it was time itself…time does heal. Maybe it was just time to let go. I remember thinking one year…I didn’t have the aura anymore. Anniversaries and birthdays came and went without my knowing. I guess it is true that when the mind and soul are ready to give something up, it happens. But I also had to remember, consciously or subconsciously that, I was working at the challenges all the time, so it it was my hard work that created the timing. It was my time, not someone else’s.

So, what happened and how did I manage this orphan stuff? I tried to let my friends know that I felt like an orphan, but no one paid much attention to that description, so I kept silent on the topic and dealt w/ the understanding of the loss by myself.

Friends wanted me to go to their families for Thanksgiving and Christmas…I couldn’t go! Most didn’t understand why I would not go. They would say, “You would rather be alone than to be w/ me and my family?” The answer for 9 years was “yes.” I needed to grieve the loss of traditions, for as long as I needed to…I stopped trying to explain. No one ever understood…except one friend…who didn’t exactly understand for awhile, but allowed me space and time and stopped inviting and asking and finally got it!

That helped tremendously…it allowed me the opportunity to start thinking about what could work…what I could manage…I started to think about if I were a child and became an orphan…what would have happened? What would have been different?….Every adult in my life would have come to my rescue…my friends at school would have still been my friends, even if they didn’t know what to say initially, I would have been taken in by my aunt and uncle…still not my family…they would have loved me to death…still not my family…but they would have helped me w/ my own direction in life…I wouldn’t have thought about traditions because they might not have been so well formed. I would have been involved in my aunt and uncle’s traditions and that would have been how life was because as a child you couldn’t make decisions around things like that.

I began to think that I could enjoy some friend’s traditions, which were not tied to family traditions or involved families. I have friends who have traditions w/ other friends and I began to ease myself into those invitations. This seemed to work because they didn’t involve families and they were not on the particular holiday, like Christmas Eve day rather than Christmas Eve or day. This has become a yearly event now and really works for me.

Oh, I almost forgot…for Christmas and Thanksgiving, I now have my own traditions. I go away w/friends or I invite individuals, who have no place to go or families live too far away, to dinner. It works…these are now my traditions and my family’s traditions are tucked in my memory in a special place for them…they cannot be replaced.

33—a great age…finding a soul mate, having great friends, embarking upon a new career, finding a great job, becoming an adult, …life seems grand…then life changes…events happen and your family is gone…all of them…In my case, my sister died in infancy, my bother was killed in Vietnam, my father died from an accident and my mother died of breast cancer…traditions are gone…family discussions are gone…who will remember what happened when…who is there to discuss the funny times at the kitchen table or remember when a special event occurred or what was special about them or even who they were? Who can understand what it feels like to be an adult orphan ?