Losing my mom, four years later

Today marks four years since I’ve lost my mom to cancer. Every year on this day, I’ve written something to help process my grief. It’s a nice way for me to gather my thoughts of the past year in relation to my mom. But it also makes me sad knowing that each year, she drifts further into the past.

I originally had typed an entire post about how the pain isn’t as intense or how I yearn for the experiences that I will never get to share with my mom for the first time. But I already wrote that last year. Here is where my grief stands in this current moment: losing my mom is simply an irrefutable fact of life. The woman the world knew as Nadia Lising is no more. She is gone.

Survivor’s guilt

I know that sounds pretty harsh, as if I don’t care anymore - but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The truth is I still carry this very heavy survivor’s guilt. Why should good things happen to me, when my mom — the most generous, hardest-working person I’ve known — was dealt the short end of the stick? Only fifty-five, are you joking?!

The seemingly indiscriminate chaos of the universe can be so cruel at times. I try my hardest in choosing to be happy. Like Ke Huy Quan’s character in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022), “this is how I fight!” But my goodness, it is hard enough to grapple with mean folks being rewarded in daily life- but to deal with the randomness and unfairness of cancer and disease? It’s BS.

It’s really sad, but we move (we simply must)

The further away I get from my mom’s death, the more details get lost in time, and what remains are the tent poles of her persona. But what sucks is that my mom was so detail-oriented, that to forget the little things would be to forget her entirely.

It wasn’t until I recently listened to a voice recording of her that I realized I had forgotten how my mom’s voice sounded. I forgotten her tendency to put on a composed, corporate voice whenever she was being recorded. And because I never recorded her berating or disciplining me, I forgot how she sounded when she was upset.

But something I will never forget is how she sounded in anguish. As true as it is to say that my mom fought until her last breath, it is also true that cancer took away her voice and reduced her to happy or disapproving grunts. I hope nobody reading this has to experience their mom’s eyes telling you a million words that her mouth cannot speak. In fact, I cannot remember the final, audible words my mom said to me.

Ending on a brighter note (mini-reference to “Interstellar”)

I try to end these posts on a lighter tone, because I tend to be a glass-half-full kind of person. As undeniably sad as it is to lose my mother at fifty-five, it is equally (if not more) sad to know that every second that goes by is a second that distances us. That being said, there is something beautiful about the love and warmth I feel towards my mom transcending time and space. Even though it has been four years since her passing, the love I have for my mother, Nadia, is unwavering.

And that is simply an irrefutable fact of life.