The Extraction

I am both a mother and a bereaved mother. While I am accepting of my newly bereaved identity, I prefer for the mother and the bereaved mother in me to exist apart. Split personalities. A notable change in my behavior when one takes over the other, and yet traits of one personality bleed into the other. One pushes the other aside in effort to take center stage. The mother side tries to assuage the fears brewing in the bereaved mother. This is all unbeknownst to me. I am only one or the other. Perhaps, staving off the bereaved mother is to not allow her to interfere with my daily interactions between me and my living children. I try to save the bereaved side of myself for June, and June alone. Inevitably, parts of her overlap with the mother in me. “Mama, why are you crying?” my daughter asks me. I don’t lie. “I’m thinking about June,” I tell her. When bereaved Mama takes over I don’t hide her from my children. I acknowledge her. I let her be seen. It’s the only way she will allow me to be present with them. It’s the only way our family will grow together.

I mother my children in front of me as they exist. I love them, I bathe them, I feed them when they are hungry. When they grow tired, I scoop them into my arms and carry them upstairs to bed. I am their mother. I was not born a mother, but I became one and now, I could never unlearn how to be a mother. It’s not a learned skill. It’s an innate being. The day I gave birth to my first daughter, she pulled the mother from the depths of inside of me to the surface. I came to learn my future self, the mother, had always lived dormant inside of my cells. How else would I have known? The ingredients to my future children were stored in my ova from the day I was born, awaiting their other half of ingredients to form an embryo. To become the children I now know. As if the mother in me always existed alongside my children.

I am a mother. June is no longer here. She no longer tells me when she’s hungry, or gives me cues as to when she wants to sleep. I am no longer on the receiving end of June’s smile as she plays with water in the bath. I can no longer feel the warmth from her body as I once did as she lay in my lap. And yet, I am still June’s mother. The only way I know to continue on with my life is to be both my living children’s mother and June’s bereaved Mama. Both personalities must exist. Since I can no longer mother June here, on earth, my body has conceived of another way to mother her, as her bereaved Mama. There is no timeline associated with the definition of bereaved. I consider this new personality may never go away. For that, I am grateful.

What becomes of a mother after her child dies? I wonder, as if I am not her, she is not me. As if time did not exist. As if June were still alive.

It’s my God-given right to mother my children, I think. I am June‘s mother. After I die, I will still be June’s mother. I was not born knowing how to fulfill this role of being June’s bereaved mother, but I also wasn’t born knowing exactly how to be a mother at all. 

Losing a child is an upset to the natural order. June should have lived to lose me. Had June lived to lose me, perhaps it would have brought suffering to June. It pains me to consider. June losing me is a worry I will never have to shoulder. A small consolation for her death. One that doesn’t touch the loss of never watching her grow. A consolation nonetheless.

In practicing my new, bereaved role, I’ve come to see that my life’s purpose is wrapped in the death of June. It has been sitting in my lap since she the day she died. For a while, the fog of grief obscured it. I’ve been holding it for the last year and a half, unsure of what to do with it. What’s inside? I wonder. I don’t have to know in order to know it’s a gift I will cherish for the rest of my life. A gift that will never stop giving. A gift I can share with others. I know others, too, will feel the ripple of the gift June left. Just recently, I’ve realized what the gift is. It’s purpose.

Life purpose is what I am carefully extracting from June’s life and our family’s experience of having June be a part of ours. Like a surgeon carefully extracting bullets from an oozing abdominal wound, I carefully extract purpose from June’s life. It’s buried and at times, I must dig. It’s hidden and mysterious, and obstacles interfere with the extraction. I can’t clearly see what I am extracting. I just know I need to extract it. If I don’t, it will spoil, and it will make me sick. Poisoning me from the inside out, just as the overlooked bullets poison the patient’s body. I must find and remove every bit of the meaning, or else, I too, will die.

Unlike the person laying on the table who needs the bullets removed, I don’t have a physical wound from the outside looking in. There are no holes that make you privy to what’s happening to my heart, or my abdominal cavity. You don’t get to take a sneak peak at my insides to understand how much I am hurting. 

“You’re not going to resign, are you?” I imagine someone asking me (no one has ever asked me this before). 

“From life?” I ask.

“Yeah, you’re not going to give up, are you?” (I have been asked this before).

“No, not today.” I respond. I have work to do. The signs are beginning to align. There is awareness needing to be spread. There are too many people unaffected by June’s death. Don’t you know that our children are dying? Don’t you know June is dead? I think every time a stranger is callous or impatient.

Resignation would demand an end to extraction. Does a surgeon stop operating when he thinks he’s done, or does he put his instruments down when all of the bullets are indeed removed, dropped into a metal bowl, counted, and recounted? For me to resume is to honor June, every day. The innate being inside of me tells me to write. Extract the meaning to survive. The innate being inside of me tells me to tell the world about June. The voice inside tells me the gift of purpose is best handled by being seen. It’s a door itself that opens to a community of people suffering in isolation because their child has also died of cancer. How do we resign when we have purpose? How do I not honor the most meaningful gift anyone has ever given me? To give up is to give up in vain. There exist one million excuses as to why I should give up, let go, move on. Moving on would be to leave the bullets in the patient’s body and sew it up. 

The surgeon is not left alone to extract the bullets. There are nurses, anesthesiologists, and surgical technologists. It is in realizing this, I know I also need to gather my team. This type of work should not be done alone. I am in the process of identifying my team and drawing them in. June is the leader of my team. She’s the person I report to every morning and every night. Support people in the periphery come and go. Sometimes they are voiceless, handing me tools I need to extract the purpose. Sometimes their voices boom and echo and are reckless. I am left contemplating the words they’ve spoken for hours or days. They are all important however because they, directly or not, are helping facilitate the meticulous daily extraction. Every person has a role. Every role is important. The most valuable role of the people around me is the support to keep going when I feel like giving up. The person who continually stays by my side and cheers for me. The person who acknowledges that although time has passed, the wound is no smaller. The pain is no less. The person who acknowledges that with each passing day something grows from the wound. The fruit of the extraction becomes bigger. The person who recognizes that I am still June’s mother and who sees bereaved Mama in me.

I don’t resign. 

I am a mother.

I am a bereaved mother, at work, completing the great extraction.

Together we will grow.

And I wonder if you’ll consider, 

What’s the purpose in this one life that you’ve been gifted?