Grief, wishes and the future

My dad has been going through his calendar / diary looking at dates, the when and where of mum’s diagnosis and illness.

I and my brother are trying to look to the future.

Mum said, not to feel guilty when she was “gone”. That was one thing she always emphasised, to go on with my life, our lives.

Dad, he’s looking into the past, trying, I think, and he’s said, sort of, to work out what else he could have done.

Near the end he was up at the Alfred twice a week, taking mum up for blood and platelet transfusions.

The thing that I constantly feel is that is isn’t fair, isn’t fair that mum’s died. That she’s gone. It isn’t fair that there’s people out there smoking, and they’re not dying, but my mum has.

I often, well I used to play the “what if” game in my mind, worry, think, feel guilt, worry some more about the what ifs of life. Think about what I could have done differently, what I wish had happened.
Now I don’t.
Now I’m trying to focus on the future.
It’s in the downtime moments where I’m not thinking that I can’t deal with things.

I guess this is grief.

I am trying to look forward. But it seems each time that I am getting used to it a road block is thrown in the way.
Mum’s memorial / funeral was one of those things.
A weird thing I’ve blogged about previously.
Experiencing it was something else.
Coffin at the front and centre.
The benches in the White Ladies area were stiff though had cushions. The White Ladies themselves were professional.
The celebrant wasn’t, got mum’s maiden name wrong. I feel like I should forgive her for that, but I don’t. She was employed to do a job, the job that she supposedly has been doing for a long time and she messed that up.

I think the whole memorial messes up the grieving process.

There’s still mum’s ashes to deal with.

Though for me she ceased to be “mum” in the hospital, where she died. Anything after that is just...I don’t know. Not.

I sometimes wish I believed in an afterlife, or in psychics or something. That I could pray and think that mum would hear me, or listen to the spirits and talk to her.
None of that’s going to happen though, none of that’s real. I can’t just magic it up.
I knew that from an early age, prayer didn’t work, there was no big higher power. There was just life, we live it and that’s it.
I accepted that when I was quite young, sometimes in early primary school or maybe earlier. I don’t really recall.

Now though, looking out into “real life” I’m...not scared. But this is real life, this is what there is.

I just wish...I don’t know, wish that we’d had more time. Despite knowing that our time was finite, that with mum’s disease it was always finite, even more finite than others, yet still I wish...something. I really don’t know.

Funerals

This is something I’ve had to face recently. My feelings about them veer from feeling weird about them to darkly comical.

Mum didn’t believe in anything, though she did at one point believe in god, with the whole ‘don’t eat meat on Good Friday or you’ll be struck down by god’ thing, something I in my teens disproved by eating meat on Good Friday and later burning a bible on that day for good measure.

Then she one day decided to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and that changed or maybe cemented her mind change with the whole god thing.

Mum went, that was one of the terms she used before she passed, “goes”, “gone” were others that we used, she went in hospital.

That’s the end, that’s where she went, she’s gone, that’s the end of the story.

A funeral seems like an epilogue to the story, not written by the author, but instead by someone else, someone who isn’t the author of the story, they’re brought in to add this little piece to the end of the story. But it’s not the author writing it, it’s not them, their style, their ink on the page.

It’s something that doesn’t need to be there, the story has finished, this thing doesn’t need to be tacked on the end.

It seems disrespectful, this isn’t something that mum would have wanted, but without having written down anything it seems we must go ahead. Though not for us, for others, that’s what makes me feel unease about this process.

We met with the celebrant yesterday. That was weird and uncomfortable, not something I will be putting my brother through, I will leave instructions that there’ll be no funeral, put me in a hole, plant a tree above.

One of the weirdest things that was suggested was to have a reading at the funeral, a verse, not a religious one, but just a reading of some sort. The weirdest and now that I reflect on it pretty sick thing is a reading written from the first person perspective. So it’s as though mum has said this verse, this bit of prose the celebrant had in her folder of words.
That’s basically putting words into someone’s mouth, someone who’s gone.
Just to make people feel in the funeral, that was what the celebrant seemed to say, make may be too strong, I think she said “allow”.

Unless you’ve done the soap opera / TV series style thing of leaving a message in video format I don’t think there should be anything said by the person whose funeral it is.

Another of the things I had to choose was the music. This I found somewhat darkly comical to choose music for the funeral, they wanted three pieces of music. Mum had an iPod and therefore a pool of music for me to look at, though she tended to just listen through a playlist and then let it repeat. Which meant that I’ve got a lot of songs that have 5+ plays, but I think that’s only because they were in a particular playlist.
Though not all were “appropriate”, mum liked certain songs, some sad, some happy, some Righteous Brothers, some Human Nature doing Motown, some ABBA and some Don McLean.
Out of the music that had 5+ plays I’ve gone with ABBA - She’s My Kind of Girl, Simon & Garfunkel - Hey, Schoolgirl, The Eagles - Life in the Fast Lane.
The last one is probably the least “appropriate” of these songs for a funeral, but is thematically how mum lived her life.

I don’t think there even needs to be a funeral. The story has ended, for my family the end was in the hospital, mum went peacefully, not in pain. That is enough.

There is no “after”. There is no “better place”. We have this life and that is it.

I have decided I will not say anything if anyone says “she’s in a better place”, I will hold my tongue for that one. That I can see is people wanting to say something, there’s not too much religious connotation in that, despite the suggestion of heaven.
But if god is mentioned I will not. Especially the particularly hateful “it was god’s will”, which has to be one of the worst things to say. That one will possibly upset me and I’ve warned my brother that I may raise my voice, cry or possibly be hysteric should someone say something like that. I’m sure anyone who’s there on the day will just put my outburst down to the latter, should it happen.