7 years ago today, my mom died of pneumonia that she came down with while on chemo for esophageal cancer.  She was diagnosed in December with this 4th round of cancer.  Every time before, she had mouth cancer, and she beat it, so I wasn’t even incredibly worried.  It was unfathomable to me that she would die.

It was the first time she’d been prescribed chemo.  I took her some Ensure on April 15th (easier for me to get from Presby downtown since I worked nearby) and I snapped a photo of her and Dad because they looked really cute and happy as I left their house.  It was the last time I saw Mom alive and well.  It was the last time I saw Dad really happy.

Mom’s death was the first significant loss of my life, and it spawned other significant events, most importantly that when Dad was diagnosed with glioblastoma almost exactly a year later, he decided after one round of treatment that he was ready to move on and join Mom (which to me also sounded like, leave Jenny and me behind).  Dad was diagnosed in April 2014 and died in January 2015.

Even before Dad died, he had decided to sell the house where he and Mom are pictured, which they had bought in 1977, where Jenny and I grew up.  His cancer surgery and treatments had caused some impairments, and so he sold his truck that he was no longer allowed to drive and moved in with Jenny.  The sale was finalized in February after his death.  Losing  both parents and our childhood home was a lot.  I still can’t go back to my old house, to that neighborhood, without a lot of pain.  I knew those losses would come . . . even as Jenny and I discussed keeping the house to rent it, we knew were just trying to hold on to the past, to our memories, to our treasures.  What made that place magical was the people who inhabited it and the memories we created there.  It was time to let it go and hope someone else would find the same magic in it we had known.  Knowledge that it was purchased to be a rental property and a few drive-bys to see how poorly the landscaping has been kept tell me that dream hasn’t come true (yet), but – it does still say “LYNN” on the mailbox, and that makes Jenny and me and the neighbors who also miss the days before we sold it smile.

Mom’s death also opened our eyes to how we deal with stressors and loss.  Jenny’s anxiety/panic returned with a vengeance; Dad was diagnosed with depression and started taking medicine for it (which I realized he should have been doing for…ever); and I discovered somewhere between the death of Mom and the death of Dad that I wasn’t coping well with stress and needed to talk to a therapist and consider medicine, also.  So far, I’ve managed with writing, talking (to a therapist), and over-the-counter aids, but I see a lot of Mom in me.  She had been on anxiety medicine when she died, and we’re both sort of helper/giver/overachiever types who tend to do too much, worry too much, and wear ourselves out.

It was actually during Mom’s last cancer diagnosis that I started writing for public consumption, on a CaringBridge page my sister created to keep everyone updated about Mom’s progress.  I found that writing helped me process my own feelings, and people seemed to identify with the things I shared.

Ultimately, I changed jobs, which I think was necessary for my quality of life, but that in itself was a stressor, and a loss, and something I’m still working out.  In the month that Mom was diagnosed, I remember working from home on a very difficult case, and my hands had started peeling and cracking.  I wrapped some Scotch tape around them and kept on going.  My husband had also started working in a different city earlier that year.  For years, I wore bandages on whatever fingers were affected and could never figure out if my hand issue was stress, diet, weather, or a combination of things.  My hands have been better for several months now, maybe a year or more.  No bandages.  I do credit some “potions” I put on them, but was it also a change in lifestyle/attitude/workload?

After Mom died, I noticed that I had less tolerance for certain things at work.  I think I took off a whole week or more for her death because she was in ICU and I was with her in the hospital, hoping she would recover, but then she didn’t, and then there was the funeral, and then I went back to work on a Friday so I only had to get through one day before I got a weekend to recover some more.  (This was wise advice from Mom’s cousin who told me once you go back, you need to be ready to BE BACK FOR GOOD.  Employer will expect that.)

With Dad, I remember planning to take off on a certain day to be with him and the hospice nurses when my sister called as I drove to work one day and said he had already started dying.  Of course I argued with her because I had not planned on this and I had court . . . but I knew.  I know what she was telling me was true.  I got to work, my friend who worked with me saw me crying at my desk as I was still trying to figure things out, and he talked to our boss and they got me out of there.  Dad was present enough when I arrived to reach for me.  And, like Mom, Jenny and I were with him when he passed.

I returned from Dad’s death in time to attend a hearing regarding a problem client.  On the way to the courthouse, we passed where dad used to work and I started to cry.  In hindsight, of course this hearing could have been done without me.  I’m not even an attorney.

When Pete went to work in another city, there were a variety of reasons why I didn’t immediately follow him.  With the death of my parents, two big reasons were gone.

And my perspective changed.

Work seemed less important.  Having a job, yes.  But having a job where I cried on my way to a hearing so soon after my dad died?  No.  Having a job where, when my mom died, one of the attorneys who attended her funeral had to explain to another problem client that my boss and I were not answering his emails because we were all at my mother’s funeral?  No.  I wanted a job where I felt less abused.  I wanted a job where I didn’t feel a need to work so defensively.  I wanted a job with less demand, less criticism, more trust.  But it took me years to get there because I loved some of the people I worked with and for, clients included, so very much.  And I recognized, after so many years, how much responsibility I had, how big my shoes were to fill.

Years passed and Pete and I decided we didn’t need the big house with all of its chores since we lived in two different cities and weren’t having children.  Another perspective changed.  One more tie cut.  I don’t know that I would have made this change if my parents were still around.  I don’t think they would have been super happy with the move uptown into the tiny apartment.  Pete’s and my house in the suburbs symbolized everything I was always taught to pursue, and it also had space for grandchildren.  But Pete and I have come to different visions for our future now, including how we want to spend our leisure time, and it isn’t yard work.

Mom and Dad would be happy that eventually, Pete and I reunited in the same city and don’t go back and forth every weekend.  Losing my parents made me question how I spend my time.  I remember Mom coming to my office one night before a hockey game we were attending together.  I was trying to finish things up and she had fallen on her way in.  There was a period where she was not being very careful and she fell a few times (something else I have noticed in myself – being distracted, being overwhelmed, not paying attention).  A friend of mine went to assist her because I couldn’t – DIDN’T – stop what I was doing just yet.  I find this unbelievable today, but it’s true.  And it’s horrible.  Nothing should have been more important than my mom arriving, especially if she was injured.  And because I put so much expectation on myself, I’ll never know if the job demanded it or if I willingly gave it over.

I’m reading a book now called Present Over Perfect by Shauna Niequist in which she talks about a job loss: ” . . . all the while grasping back to a job and identity that was no longer mine to grasp.”

In June, it will be a year since I left that job, and I still identify so much as a member of that firm.  I have written to people and identified myself as “formerly of ____” because I’m not sure the recipient knows me otherwise – and because I still feel part of a place that I am not.  This past year has been about learning to be a new employee, relearning how to be a full-time spouse, and learning how not to get so invested in a job, because the fact is, once you leave a job, you are gone . . . severed . . . out . . . even if some people do keep in touch with you here and there.  I need to quit referencing myself in relation to that firm.  It would be like getting divorced and printing up address labels that say, “Former Mrs. Pete.”

For the last 7 years, I guess I’ve been struggling with identity in a lot of ways.  My husband and I lived apart, then back together.  We spent all of the apart time explaining, “Yes, we’re still married.  Yes, we like each other.”  And my parents died, and my identify felt enormously damaged.  We spend so much of our youth fighting for independence and freedom, but then our parents die and we struggle to know who we are if not their children.  Of course I know I still am Tom and Betty’s daughter . . . it’s just very different when they aren’t around to tell anyone.  And now, for almost a year I am back in a city where I used to live, trying to make new friendships and revitalize old ones.  I like my job and I like my boss, but he’s had so much turnover that he often refers to me in writing as “staff” and my email address doesn’t even have my name in it.  And I’m trying to not get too invested since that turns me into a person who leaves her mother bleeding on the sidewalk.  Maybe we’ll find a happy medium somewhere.

Thank you for sticking with me (so far) as I continue to try to “find myself” and “be my best self.”  I’m pretty sure it won’t happen in a video chat, so . . . maybe on the other side of this pandemic.