I love you mum.

my journey over the cancer seas.

Yesterday was a deeply emotional one. Not because of the chemo fug, or the ear infection that has left me in the throes of another round of antibiotics. Nor because of despair for the crazy tightrope you are all walking out there, with dissenting voices on each side. It isn’t because of the burning fires and extreme flooding, melting ice caps or droughts beyond the possibility of life. I have soft despairing tears for all these things in differing moments, but this emotion was a quiet one that catches me in late July. When the ox eye daisy are in full splendour alongside the pink fireweed. Where the grasses are rich and ready with seed. The burnt umber of broad leaf dock daring you to gather its bounty and spread it further. This is a time of mourning. The time my mum left the earth plane. Forty four years. A lifetime and yet a moment ago.

The feeling doesn’t come with thoughts of at first. It comes with tugs and pushes. Moments of weep catch me unawares, no apparent reason, just a body release. Its the same every year, a cyclical loop that links to the younger me that anguishes for the loss of her mother. And now this year I have reached the same moments. The memories are stark and pained. A woman who had Cushing’s disease, slowly falling into the madness of likely tumours on her pituitary and kidney. Unable to navigate the necessary calls of motherhood with three young growing girls. Its a strange thing to live with another’s fractured mind, and witnessing their dissent unto a point of no return. Who can blame her for giving up in the end. It shapes your design for life. Its not that I want to be morbid or break you open with the sadness of hearing my pain. Its just a moment to talk of mum. That’s all. This is the story I know of her, gleaned from my own long distant memory and snippets of conversation with family members who were open to talking about her life and subsequent demise.

Having lived through the hidden conversations and oddly pieced together versions of what happened to mum, I urge all you parents out there to tell your children what is going on. Be deeply honest with them about such things and perhaps, in spite of the pain it may cause in the initial telling, they will be at peace with the knowing as they mature into the grown. Maybe in being given a frame to understand, and necessary moments to process and grieve they can find a solace I have spent a lifetime seeking. Who knows, just a thought.

I don’t have any room for blame. What is just is. I’m only setting a context to the story I know of the woman who bore me before she departed the earth at 31. I need to find a new way of honouring her memory. In the midst of the deepest and darkest of the cancer treatments I don’t think its any surprise that I find mum here. This is my profoundest trauma, this is the place I have to touch and embrace with the softness of what I imagine a different version of mum might have done with me and my sisters.

Its said that we only grieve to the depth of our love. Then mum I certainly love you. I see variations of your passion, fire and will in me. You were beautiful and flawed. I see you in my face each day, its taken a long-time to accept the treasure of our similar looks. I am not you, and yet came through you. I know that now. Too late to embrace motherhood from my own womb, but someone in this family line had to choose a different path. Nonetheless, I am here because you chose to birth me and in that decision I have to be certain there was joy and some happiness for your soul.

I wish you were here to hold my hand through this cancer story. You're not though and I could talk of the things I lost without your physical presence in my life. That’s too easy. Instead I choose to gather my love for you and take it to the earth. I share with you my trodden paths. My victories and wins, pains and losses. Each year we can be held in the bosom of the earth together. Each year I will enter the summer fields and weep with gratitude for you.

I love you mum. Thank you.