(This isn’t a review on The Pitt, though I might do one at a later date. Anyway, I just wanted to state that at the start.)
When my daughter was born, I discovered that all of my emotions were right at the surface. It didn’t take much to make me cry; my baby girl holding my finger, or falling asleep on me would cause a gush of joyous tears out of me. But I also began to notice that commercials that had to do with parents and kids would make a big softy outta me. I even cried watching a Simpsons when Marge sang a lullaby to Bart. I wouldn’t call this state sensitive, nor thin skinned, but it was a state where I felt that it was very easy to tap into what I was feeling. Maybe everything didn’t make me cry, but I was able to feel everything. I learned to control it, but “control” isn’t the right word – I learned to work with it, might be a better description.
The only other time I felt that way was when my mother was in the hospital, and the fear of her death made me and my whole family exist without much of an emotional filter. When the doctor confirmed that she was, in fact, going to die and there was nothing that could be done to save her, what littler filter we had dissipated. One moment we would be normal and having a conversation, and then something would snap, and we would just explode in tears – just loud painful sobs. Then it would pass, only soon at any moment we would again break in sobs, tears of grief. After she passed, we all dealt with her death in our own ways; each person’s mourning was their own. We were there for each other, but we all took different paths in dealing with it.
For me, I just tried to plow ahead. I had a kid to take care of and a family to provide for. I was left feeling sad all the time for about two years. Not so many tears after that first year, but on special days, holidays, birthdays; the sadness would return, but anger started showing up for me as well. I have been trying to work through my anger and sadness. I through myself into art, creative outlets, and putting a few additional pictures of my mother up around the home. It’s been almost seven years, and talking about her doesn’t hurt anymore, which I know is a sign of progress.
But there are a few areas that I know I have been avoiding, or not processing well. One of the oddest manifestations of my avoidance is that I pretty much won’t watch medical shows. Anything with doctors or hospitals, I will come up with a reason not to watch it. I won’t even watch reruns of M*A*S*H or ER. And I know 100% why, and it’s because I don’t want to relive any of those feelings of watching my mother slowly die in a hospital bed.
But I am a huge ER fan, and curiosity got the better of me and I started watching The Pitt, and sure as shit there is a story line about an elderly father not wanting to be intubated to stay alive, and his adult children over rule his wishes. The show didn’t shy away from showing the pain and discomfort the father was in, as well as showing the confusion, guilt, shame, and fear of having to make end of life decision for your parents.
The situation in the show was not exactly like the one me and my family went through with my mother, but it was painfully close enough. And as I watched the story unfold, the vice in my head kept telling me to shut it off, it was late, go to bed, you have an early morning, reliving your pain won’t help… But I pushed though it. I let myself go back there. Feel it again; the fear and pain, and numbness and rawness and confusion – sometimes not knowing how I was going to survive this. How was I going to keep living without my mother? How was I going to live with this loss, this pain, all of this that will never go away?
I sat on my couch at 1am and just cried for a while. I don’t even know if the show was that good, but I know I let something out that I haven’t been acknowledging existed in the first place. I have been dodging that final week of my mother’s life. That week where she was in a hospice bed with a morphine drip, and it was my mother but it wasn’t. She wasn’t there, and we just listened to her breathing with everything and nothing passing through my head. I sat there watching her dying, and we all spoke to her, but she was never going to respond back to us. I just wanted my mom to touch my hand and tell me that she loved me, but that moment had passed. All I could do was watch and wait, and it was so painful.
I am still processing, and a dear friend did say to me that we never stop processing losing a parent; it just becomes a part of who we are. I think they’re right, and I love them for their honesty with me. I still have places and emotions I need to work through. Recesses that refuse to come into the light of day. I know where they are, and what they are. Just not always ready to deal with them yet.
I will.
In time.
