Choosing to fight

For anyone who has experienced the loss of a close family member, you would agree that it isn’t the burial that’s the most difficult.  It’s carrying on without them.  It’s coming home and they not there.  It’s realizing you will never hear their voice again and never get to hold them.  It’s the painful truth that, if they were a pillar in your life as my mother was in mine, the biggest storm you ever faced would be done without them, because their passing was the cause of it. It’s an emotional storm that rages on without consent, as your heart feels things you never thought you would ever feel. Peace is a foreign concept and the memory of you once having it becomes distant as depression and anxiety lay at the foot of the door of your heart, eager to creep in. Even the overcast sky with its rolling fierce clouds and flashes of lightning fails to reflect the storm of my emotions in your mind.

I’ll never forget the day I watched my mother take her last breath. She had suffered too long, they said. It was her time and she had run her race. I had no choice but to believe them.  But, as the days turned into weeks, the visits, calls, and messages got fewer, and people assumed time would heal the wound her loss had caused, I realized that normal looked different without her.

If I could describe a day’s emotions it would be near impossible on my worst days.  On better days, one word that best describes it is anxious.  The Cambridge dictionary defines anxiety as, “an uncomfortable feeling of nervousness or worries about something that is happening or might happen in the future.”
Imagine constantly anticipating something bad to happen.  Adrenaline coursing through your body as you neither fight nor flee until it manifests as inflammation.  Inflammation which further exasperates the anxiety sending you to doctor after doctor but not dealing with the root of the problem, therefore continuing the cycle.   This was my reality.

Relief came in the form of subtle still voice which could’ve easily got drowned by the war waging in my mind.  Laying up at night, staring at the ceiling.  Remembering the details of watching the woman who brought me into the world leave the world, I heard one word.

Fight….

I had no idea what fighting looked like but I knew it wouldn’t include pills.  I knew it would require me to stop listening to what other people thought was best for me and listen to the voice my mother taught me as a child to listen to.  So, I fought. Every minute of every day, I fought until I crawled out of the hole I found myself in and laughed from my belly like I once had.  I fought until I slept without a sleep aid.  I fought until I was at peace with the process even though it wasn’t a pretty one. My prayer for you, reader, is that you find in the words of this blog, the courage to fight.  The support to keep waking up and living because whatever storm you may be facing, by the law of nature, can only last a season.