An Orphan at 30

The things I couldn’t say about my parents, until now.

When I lost my mom to cancer in February 2020, I could not find the words to speak about her at her wake or her funeral. Aside from greeting everyone who came to pay their respects, I was silent - still reeling from the loss after her brief five month battle with stage 4. Not long after I lost my mom, I was reminded of something she said to me when my grandma died in 2004. When my mom lost her mom, just a few years after also losing her dad, she said to me that at 58 years old, she was an orphan. That same year, in the span of a month, my mom had become both an orphan and a widow. My mom had lost her mom and her husband, my dad, in the same month. We spent a year watching our dad and grandma wither away, both from cancer. When my dad died, I was 15. Little did I know that by the time I was 30, I’d be saying the same words that my mom said to me. I am officially an orphan.

I spent the next 15 years following the death of my dad slowly trying to fill the unfillable void that was left from his passing. I learned to drive, graduated high school and college; I got married, snagged some great jobs, and settled into life. But life has a funny way of only standing still for so long, and in 2017, we got terrible news: my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Not long after her diagnosis, she underwent surgery, chemo and radiation. As a woman in her 70’s, her recovery was nothing short of remarkable. Her initial side effects were minimal, she didn’t lose any hair, and she was able to continue living alone during the entirety of her treatment. When she received her initial cancer diagnosis, she was upbeat about her chances. When she went into remission, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the recovery didn’t last long; and in September 2019 she found out that her cancer had returned, and this time it wasn’t curable.

To those who weren’t close to my mom, I can only describe her as someone who loved hard, and with that, she was a little misunderstood. She was a nurse for more than 40 years, she spent nearly her entire life taking care of others. She begrudgingly taught me how to drive and bought me my first car. She quit her job when I was in high school so that she could spend time with me before I went off to college. She volunteered for nearly every campaign I worked for in my early career. She used to call me when I lived in Cincinnati, and many times, I’d be out at a bar with friends, and she always managed to call during Happy Hour. But I would never hesitate to answer, sneaking away from my friends so that she and I could talk, sometimes for more than an hour. I’d answer the phone and she’d always say, “Ems? What are ya doin?” She was naturally good hearted. She embraced my stepson with open arms, and you would have never known that he wasn’t biologically hers. Weeks before I got married, he was so excited to learn that she would become his “Grandma Judy”.

My mom was a good person, but she also spent 15 years of her life grieving the loss of her husband, her life partner and father of her children. She was never able to recover from that loss, a piece of her died with him on the day he left us. As the years went on, she became bitter, consumed by her grief. She was envious of others who were still able to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and birthdays. She became isolated, and on some days she’d be completely uninterested in the daily human interaction that of us people crave. Even as my siblings and I visited her often, she spent a lot of her time alone, dating occasionally but never being able to fully move on from the loss of my dad. There were times where everything was great, but there were also times when her attitude made us want to stay away. We grappled with the mood swings and the sorrow that all but swallowed her whole, and we always came back, because she was our mom.

When she became sick again, all of those feelings came to a head. Her grief became elevated when she realized there was nothing more she could do for herself. The worst part of watching someone die is knowing that they know the end is near. Watching them deteriorate so quickly while still being fully aware of the situation feels even harder than watching someone lay comatose in a hospital bed. The loss of control was the worst part, the planning for “not if, but when”. My moms anger became intensified, and she had all but given up. There were lots of times when she asked, “why me?”, and we didn’t have an answer.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to become a fixer; I don’t like to dwell on things. When issues arise, I would rather nip them in the bud and move on. This happened in the final weeks. With help, of course, I found myself writing a last will and testament, filing my moms taxes, getting the passwords to her accounts, researching loan forgiveness upon death, transferring bills, a home, a car… and finally, typing out her obituary.

Studies have shown that women who are grieving are more likely to tell their story over and over again to help process their feelings. It can help someone come to terms with what they’re feeling, understand their emotions, and feel heard and supported. But what happens when you’re grieving in the middle of a global pandemic? A time when millions of others are grieving the loss of their loved ones, when people have gone nearly a year without seeing friends and family in person, when embracing one another is considered off-limits. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this. Grieving the loss of someone close to you is always difficult, but during a time like this, that grief becomes sidelined in order to preserve what little bit of mental stability we have left. If anything, grieving the loss of my parents - becoming an orphan, as my mom referred to it - gave me a different perspective on celebrating life. My mom died just weeks before the nationwide lockdowns, and in hindsight I actually consider us lucky, given the circumstances. Lucky that we were able to have a real funeral, and in-person calling hours; lucky that we were able to be with her until the very end, and lucky to celebrate her life in a way that every person deserves. During lockdown, I have found myself combating immense loneliness, while at the same time feeling incredibly grateful that we didn’t have to endure cancer treatment and a funeral in the middle of this madness. Thankful that we haven’t had to experience loss from COVID, even if we experienced loss in other ways. There are a lot of people in this world who can’t say the same, and I’ve learned not to make comparisons about my sadness, not to compete about who has the worse situation, but instead I have learned to grieve with them, because death is hard.

In the weeks leading up to my mom's passing, I experienced what I like to refer to as an existential crisis. I found myself questioning whether my life has any real meaning. Am I doing the right things? Am I where I should be at 30? Am I going to die feeling like my accomplishments weren’t enough? One night while my mom was hospitalized and I couldn’t sleep, I applied for a graduate program, not even a month after having just completed a Masters program. I started applying to jobs in different states, started talking to realtors about putting our house on the market, packing everything up and never looking back.

Just when I thought that I was beginning to fill the void from the loss of my dad, the loss of my mom ripped that void into oblivion. It’s a different grief now. When my dad died, I was 15, a Sophomore in high school. I felt disconnected from my dad's diagnosis and treatment, my parents tried to shield us from the worst of it all. When he died, I was sad, but it was almost surreal, it almost felt as thought there was a weird fog over it all. And in the end, we still had our mom. She was an absolute rock, someone who absorbed our pain and sorrow, the backbone that we needed to make it through at such young ages. Now that we don’t have either parent, I’ve thought about all of the things I could have done differently, all of the regrets that I have, and all of the experiences I won’t get to have with them.

I watched a video on TikTok not long ago, where the creator prompted people to name a time when someone said something that you’ll never forget. A man reposted, talking about how his mother was weeks away from death. When he was younger and he moved out, his mom said to him, “You think you can do life without me? I survived 20 years without you, you’ve needed me your whole life.” My mom survived 41 years without me, but I’ve needed her my whole life. So what now?

When you lose your parents, especially at a young age, you spend a lot of time questioning what life will look like as you move forward. And you start thinking about all of the things that they won’t be there for. You also start to think about death differently, there’s a fear that falls over you, the feeling of an impending end to everything you know. I let those feelings consume me for a long time, but I also started to think about life differently. When my mom was hospitalized, not long before she passed, she talked to some nurses about “the end” of it all, and how she wished she had done things differently. That’s where life changes for me at this point. I no longer want to live thinking about what I could do, but rather what I will do. Thinking about the future - siblings getting married, nephews learning to drive, starting new sports seasons, even babies of my own - all of this will happen without my parents. And while the pain is sometimes unbearable, and it feels impossible to deal with the thought of living forever without them, that’s life. I know I can’t spend my future years bitter about my circumstance, because if I do, I’ll miss out on all of the good.