As A Bereaved Mother Curiosity Has Saved My Life
“I am growing with my grief.”
June in the backyard — photo by author
My daughter June died from neuroblastoma three years ago on March 13th. As I tally the last three years, I don’t allow for my brain to penetrate the often devastating, hopeless existence it has been on many days.
Today, instead of adding up the relentlessly difficult days, I admire the threads of hope and purpose I have intentionally collected since June died.
I weave the threads together. They are symbols of strength, meaning, and resilience. Three things which have helped me to normalize and integrate the absolute unthinkable into my life.
Please know, my toddler dying of cancer will never be ‘normal’. There are days I still wake up wondering, is this really my life? Despite great efforts to heal my nervous system, I am regularly shocked back into the state of flight or fight.
By focusing on my cultivated strength, I choose how I will live in the days ahead. I take back a little control. Instead of pushing June’s death away, I weave it with my reclaimed loom into the coarse linen of my life. Perhaps, by not judging the events that have unfolded, and therefore, not seeing my existence as a horrible, ruined mess, I can remain curious and hopeful. Likely, you wonder what curiosity could come from losing a child to cancer. I am here to tell you, it comes in many forms, and it has saved my life.
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Grief is the permanent reminder that June is never coming back. A dense fog that lowers and lifts. Thickens and thins. Travels out to sea and back in. A permanent reminder of life’s impermanence. Love’s fog that I am cast within.
She is gone, but I am still alive. A catastrophe I am forced to accept. However, my curiosity to discover the meaning behind June’s death and apply it to my greater being helps me to also accept there is a reason I lived, or I too, would have died.
As if living isn’t proof enough for the bereaved mother she must continue on. The deeper significance has to be found.
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On the anniversary of June’s death, I allow myself reprieve from the deeper thoughts surrounding the last days of her life. The ones I can never forget. Her face moments before her last breath.
The pain is too great for me to turn inward, face that she is gone, and stare death in the eye. I have trained my brain to allow itself to turn outward and become curious about the world around me when I cannot handle the burden within.
On a walk through the woods.
From the living room floor, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling while my living children, giggling, run circles around me and fall to their hands and knees.
From the grocery cart, where my son sits pointing to the vegetables and fruits surrounding us, asking, “Mama what’s that?” A moment becomes enormous when I allow myself to see through his wondering eyes. Temporarily, it pushes the thoughts of the badness out of my life.
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The thoughts of June dying aren’t the polite visitors who knock before they enter. They come clamoring in.
The memories of June’s final days are so powerful that I must put up a barricade to prevent them from entering. I feel sorry for this, but they are debilitating and unkind. I have no other choice. I reserve them for when I am alone and can safely and inwardly agonize in the darkness that belongs to me.
In the interim, I let myself off the hook because the thoughts are crushing. It is in those times, that if I choose to not give up, my eyes begin to curiously wander. With deep breaths, I allow my senses to take in external factors. I know when my body finally relaxes because I begin to see the magic that exists within my pain.
Like, for example, on the third anniversary of June’s death, I dragged my feet through daily obligations in a misty rain.
“The sky cries too, June,” began my narrative. “The sky cries for you.”
Come to think of it, I don’t remember an anniversary of her death when the sky hasn’t cried. It fits my narrative. It’s comforting.
The droplets of rain on my face felt cool, almost replenishing, when I considered them to be in honor of June.
When that evening arrived, the clouds parted, and we were gifted a full moon. A beautiful Blood Moon in the sign of Virgo (not ironically, June’s sign — Virgo) that didn’t only provide me with extra light as I wandered outside into the brisk nighttime air to let out the puppy one last time. It also promised new beginnings when I realized there would also be a total lunar eclipse.
The moon disappeared, shadowed, then turned red.
Blood red like my broken heart.
Blood red like my still beating heart.
They are the same, it doesn’t matter the day.
They are always the same.
Doesn’t it make sense that I will grieve for the rest of my life? The thread of hope in this situation is that in the last three years, I have developed protective barriers around hurt, ones that I use in my favor.
This is grief three years after my daughter has died.
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When I read about the astrological significance of the eclipse, it made so much sense. It fit perfectly around the anniversary of June’s death by symbolizing the loss of something. Such as the energy of letting go of the things that don’t serve us, a common theme in my life. It also represented healing the areas of our lives related to loss. I might sound like a lunatic, but this sacred sign uncannily applies to my life.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity, which I did plenty of leading up to the last day June spent on earth, I extracted meaning and created a narrative around the third anniversary of her death which began with the sky crying and ended in a Blood Moon with a total lunar eclipse.
This allowed for an entire moon of peace to fill my broken heart.
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Initially, the meaning I created after June died wasn’t as woo-woo as my narrative of the Blood Moon. I’d add things like getting off the couch or, eventually, going to the store. Each a feat, creating a notch in my bereaved mother survival belt.
I didn’t know I would be making figurative notches in a belt after June died, but like the threads, it helps. I have accepted the belt and use it in my favor. I’ve wrapped it around me and as the pain changes, the hurt shrinks just a bit. I am able to make another notch and reminded in this uncontrollable, extremely uncomfortable situation, that I have a choice on how to live after June has died.
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Grief is still not without its physical aches and pains which returned in February, when the days started to grow longer. When the evening sky began to feel more like an omni theater than just the usual wintry night. When the sky’s blue hue spread so vastly I felt as if it might swallow me whole as I limped up the front steps gripping the railing with terrible knee pain. Some nights, its eternal reflection became too upsetting in its memory of the last days of June’s life that I felt I might dive upward into the blue sea, never to return.
My aches and pains continued with the end of daylight savings, which fell on the morning of the last day of June’s life the year she died. Only then, did I think maybe once or twice, had the clocks not jumped ahead, the time she died was actually 10:05 and not 11:05. Or that by luck, she gained an extra hour on the last day of her beautiful and chaotic life. My baby who was born on the first day of Autumn experienced an extra hour of sunlight the evening she died.
The meaning for me exists here. I don’t have to mold it to fit my life. I only have to get curious and pay very close attention to the details around me.
These are the things the grieving mother considers three years later while creating meaning on the anniversary of the last day of her child’s life. The tiniest imprints etched in life’s stone that can never be forgotten once they have been seen.
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I wonder, “Who am I today after surviving the last three years?”
Despite being held on a bed of nails, I hope I am still kind and not embittered by the sharp, metallic taste of June’s death. I hope my children enjoy my company and don’t find me too harsh or overbearing, as I know all good mothers can be. It’s hard to explain to them that I just care so much. That I am still so afraid. That I wish life turned out differently. That I am trying my best.
I hope they see me as their Mama and not a broken mother. I still intend to create the life I always dreamed of for myself and them. I don’t know if it’s possible after your child has died, but this bereaved, evolved version of me is willing to find out.
I have the key, which I’ve realized not everyone possesses, to unlocking life’s greatest gifts. Why I had to endure my child’s death to come to this, I am uncertain, but I will not waste my precious key which unlocks the doors of significance to June’s life. It will allow for me to open them and step into June’s light.
I hate to refer to keeping “June alive through her memory” because that is not what this is. June is not just a memory. What I create for meaning in my present life keeps June alive, her memory merely a byproduct. It keeps her present in our family. We feel her energy all around us. We choose to believe her presence is forever saturating our lives.
A present moment only becomes a memory when the moment has passed. Until then, I let June be present.
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Memories are another topic. The further from June’s death I travel, the greater the void of time grows between me and her. It feels unfair, as I stack the last three years of my life against her one-and-a-half. It makes three years unbearable. With time, the greater the gap becomes between me and a society who doesn’t understand how I could possibly move on and be healthy, while I am actively grieving my child. One that pities me and can’t comprehend that in order to live a full and meaningful life, I must incorporate her into my every day.
By remembering June, I continue to heal and to grow with the loss, and not away from it. It is empowering for me to grow with my child’s death. To grow away from it would be to grow into the darkness, where without light, I’d suffocate. No earthly being grows away from the light, nor would they ever choose to. Grieving mother is no exception. She’d certainly never tell you to turn away from your light.
June is the sun. I can reposition myself in any direction. People can lead me away from her with their uncertainty, but like the plants, the trees, the vines that find the light, I always grow in the direction of her. By leaning into the light, it is the only way to continue growing when a part of me has died.
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It pains me to admit that three years later, it is difficult for me to conjure an organic memory with June. It’s only been three years. I try to remember moments sitting under the porch, protected from the hot sun, while my oldest daughter ran through the sprinkler in the backyard. I remember Junie, laughing, and pointing at her big sister. I remember the days, she laid, sort of limp, in the same carseat which she loved, eyes glazed over which prompted me to worry that the elements of the outdoors were too overbearing for such a fragile, tiny being enduring chemotherapy.
On good days, I wondered if she wished to run through the sprinkler with the older sister she adored, or if just sitting there, was enough to bring her a morsel of joy. I remember these moments, but they’re evoked from an encapsulated photograph from my phone, frozen in time.
The memories I now have are sorted and pulled like those from a catalogue. At a glance of the photo, my brain melts into the scene and I am brought back to life with June. Without the photos, much of my memory of June would be gone. Recalling the detailed lines of her precious face. The blue of her eyes. Her devilish laugh and scrunched up nose when she found something funny. Again, all of these memories are brought forth by a photo.
The only exception to my memory are the traumatic or few momentous events that took place in the final year of June’s life.
The day June was born and the day she died, are two days forever burned into my mind. Perhaps, I’ll never need a photo to remind me of those days. It brings me relief when I worry about how full my iCloud is or if it’s realistic to keep shelling out over twenty dollars a month to store them.
I wonder about people who didn’t have access to phones or cameras before their child died. It makes me cry.
Empathy for others is a common daily thread I now weave into my life.
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I got off the couch. I left the house. I started a blog. I write about June every day. Sometimes, I share it. Other times, I keep it for grieving mother. There are things in this life that will never make sense. June’s death is one of them. Yet, three years later, without any more clarity than the day she was diagnosed, I am here. Let this be a stamp in time letting everyone know, my daughter died, but I am alive. I love more deeply. I feel more fiercely. I care more about the things that didn’t used to matter. These are the doors I have access to with my key.
I am the same mother that once thought if her daughter died, she’d die too.
My heart is broken, but it still beats.
I intend to keep June alive by threading her through my life until I reach the final day of mine.
Three years later, I’ve learned this is how I will grieve and experience happiness. I am a bereaved mother finding balance in my broken life. By staying curious and open-minded, I will survive.
