By Shuma, whose mum died from cancer in the summer of 2015
My name is Shuma. I am the founder of @spokengrief, a page that shares grief stories, guides, thoughts, interactive stories and plans to share so much more in the future.
My mum was diagnosed with stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer in 2013. Within a year, she went through chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and had a mastectomy. After all of this, she was in remission for a year.
At the start of 2015, she complained of a murmur in her ear and lost her balance frequently. The GP said she had an ear infection. But then she began vomiting profusely. Having had tests, scans and blood taken from her, they discovered she had 12 brain lesions and tumours around her stomach and lungs.
Three months to live they said...
Two weeks after her 55th birthday, on 27th July 2015, my mum’s beautiful soul fluttered away from this earth.
Here are the Five Things I’ve learned since losing my mum to cancer:
1. Nothing in life prepares you for the death of a loved one.
Societal norms don’t help either. Nobody wants to talk about dying when they’re too busy living life. Even when my mum was weak and on her death bed, everyone beat around the bush about it. The truth is we will all taste death one day - so how long can we continue running from this topic?
2. Losing a loved one filters out empty relationships.
Inevitably my circle became smaller. Sometimes it hurts to experience secondary losses such as friendships, but over time I have grown from this and realised I was better for it.
3. You only have yourself...
Not to say there is no support out there but due to the subjective nature of grief, it’s really difficult to express everything and feel completely understood. Only I can figure this journey out. It’s lonely. It’s brutal. It’s exhausting. I’m taking it one day at a time for now (and I have been for almost six years) and here I am surviving.
4. Life will never be what it was.
I will never be who I was. The day my mum died, the former version of myself died too. Sometimes I still long to be the person I was but I accept I can never be that person, not without the most important person in my life missing.
5. Grief is a gift.
It’s changed every part of my life and I have a love/ hate relationship with it. I question how much easier life would be without this rollercoaster of a journey, but I don’t think I can live without grief. My grief is the only thing that keeps me connected to my mum. It’s a gift that she left behind. Forever on my mind and in my heart.
