Traumatized

Every time I see a post on social media about cancer I feel the immediate urge to run away from my computer and all forms of social media, never to return. Don't get me wrong, leaving social media would not be terrible, but the trauma I am experiencing has a correlation with cancer. My mom died from an aggressive form of lung cancer. It was horrific and reduced my mother to a shell of her former self. Now when I see posts from my friends who are actively seeking comfort and sympathy for what they are going through, I want to run in the opposite direction and not emotionally invest my time in them. That is the troubling part. I call some of these people friends, and yet I look at them now with grey-colored glasses. I am fearful of investing time and I am scared that I will lose them too. That is no way to live and yet I have more work to do with the trauma I have gone through. It feels like it was a lifetime ago, and yet we are still within the first year of losing her. We are still going through firsts. This will be the first Christmas without her and then the first New Year, her birthday when she is not here, valentines day... my birthday... all of it fresh and raw like a healing wound that keeps reopening. 

One of our toxic family traits is to try to ignore the grief we are feeling and to not talk about the struggles that may be going on, and I have been always much more open than my family, but this... this is a struggle. I have had a great deal of difficulty opening up about our experience. I am terrified of cancer. I watched it reduce the strongest woman I know to nothingness. It took up shop in her and then hollowed her out. I am fearful that it will happen to me, that I will leave my husband and children far too soon. A coping mechanism for me has been to remind myself that my story is not her story. We live entirely different lives. She was a longtime smoker and had unhealthy eating habits as a result of severe acid reflux, and I am a non-smoker, asthmatic who works out 3 times a week and tries to eat a balanced diet. I say try as I just ate the rest of a bag of chips, but truth be told I am living my life. 

All of this is to say that I am at the age where my friends end up with severe maladies. Even my family, and my cousins are dealing with health issues and even my aunts and uncles who were the bedrock of my education, pillars are starting to crumble around me. It is painful and all I want to do is run from it, to hide, but there is no hiding from this. 

What rings in my ears is " you don't really grow up until you lose your mom". I now understand why people say do not wish to grow up too soon. In my twenties, I was desperate to be an adult and now, would you just look at me? I am in my thirties and it feels like I am losing more than I am winning. That doesn't mean I stop trying to do things to win and succeed at my goals, but these losses are hard to stomach at times. The loss of a perceived normal and the loss of time, time that in my twenties felt immeasurable and even well into my thirties, only to realize that time is a precious commodity. 

As I put a close to this year I realize that the time I spent this year was important. I put it into the people and places of substance. Not to say there weren't others that I wanted to spend time with, but my family was my focus. We needed to heal, I need to heal. I put my energy in healing my family, my children, my sister and my dad. I need to take time for myself. I need to heal too.