Naomi's Story: Understanding grief emotions

My mum was a woman defined by selflessness. She was always helping others, both in her career as a social worker and advocate, and in her personal life as a mother, daughter, wife and sister. For a woman who worked so hard to help others, it seems the epitome of cruel that her life was brought abruptly to an end by a disease like cancer.

I had assumed I would fall apart following mum’s terminal diagnosis. But, as a friend told me, the sun keeps rising each morning. This was true, and as the sun rose each morning, it marked another day and another night I had made it through. But also, another day closer to when mum would no longer be here.

Mum’s illness began to take hold as I was starting my second year at university. I had to decide - did I want to carry on? Would it even be possible? I thought I’d give it a go and came to the conclusion that I would move home to live in Reading and commute once a week for seminars.

It seemed that university work was the only thing that could distract me from the terrifying reality I was facing. I would sit in my room, reading about all sorts and writing endless essays, whilst my mum would be battling through her illness in the room beneath me, trying to minimise the worries my family had. When I look back on my second year at university, I get so annoyed. It had been a year where I had gone through the worst time of my life and missed out on all the fun everyone else seemed to be having.

At the start of mum’s diagnosis, my university put me in contact with the Politics’ Student Support Officer, who I had weekly calls with. Each week, I’d log onto Zoom and have an hour or two of sometimes mindless and sometimes emotional conversations with a woman who had never met any of my family.

Having an independent individual, outside of my circle of family and friends was a tool which immensely aided my navigation of waiting for mum to die, and also grieving after mum was gone.

Christmas in particular had been really hard. Mum had been in and out of hospital, and all of us were aware that it would be her last Christmas. Time was running out to make our last memories of mum. Christmas had always been a time of year which I loved, but knowing this was the last Christmas where I would wake up to a hug from mum on Christmas morning changed my perspective. I couldn’t view Christmas as a celebration, it felt like the beginning of a very painful goodbye.

Mum rapidly went downhill at the start of February, and soon enough the inevitable happened. The first morning I woke up after she’d died, I went and did a food shop. I felt as if I had the worst hangover in the world. Banging headache, immense tiredness, and everything was spinning. But still, on the seemingly worst and most definitive day of my life thus far, I was doing the most normal and mundane things.

I lost my Mum, Rachel, to pancreatic cancer in February 2023. She was 56, and I was 20. When I read that line back to myself, I feel numb. Yet when I stop and think about what that line actually means to me, I am flooded with emotions: anger, jealousy, anxiety, confusion.

For the first few weeks after she died, I didn’t give myself time to stop and think. I just wanted to be happy and would do anything I could to be happy. It was only after these weeks when we began to get into the rhythm of our new life that new emotions began to surface.

Jealousy was the first emotion, and the most all-consuming. To put it bluntly, I am jealous of anyone who has a mum still alive. Whether that be strangers I see, a mum and daughter walking down the street, or anyone posting them and their mum on social media; all these strangers have something I had taken away from me. It just doesn’t seem fair. People weren’t to know that my mum had died but seeing the endless stream of Mothers’ Day posts just a month after she’d gone felt like a dagger to the heart each time.

Anger was the next emotion. I get angry at the world, and angry at people for not realising how good they have it. Sometimes my jealousy turns into anger. I have to remind myself that the anger I feel at times is not because of my friends and their inability to understand how I feel, it is anger at the situation I am in. It is not fair to be angry at my friends or strangers for having a mum - that is not their fault.

The last emotion I have found myself grappling with is worry. I am worried for my future and how I am supposed to navigate all the new hurdles thrown my way without the guidance of my mum. I am worried that I will be diagnosed with the same illness my mum was. It is a terrifying reality to know what can happen to a person, and how quickly someone you love can be taken away so prematurely from you.

I think the only lesson to take from this worry is to live without wasting time. As my mum approached her final days, the success she had in her career or the exam grades she got did not matter. But what did matter were the family and friends she had around her.

I use this thought to reassure myself - life should be about being content and happy in yourself, not how successful you have been in your career. Sadly, we do not know how long we have in life, and as many of us are all too aware, life can be over much sooner than any of us plan for it to be.

The idea of saying goodbye to mum is something I have never liked. That said, I would like to share with you something my mum’s friend from school told me. She said it was important to remember that mum isn’t going to just vanish into thin air since she died.

Instead, she is just “going around the corner”. And as I look back throughout the life my mum lived, and the memories I shared with her, I think it is quite fitting to imagine her to be just around the corner.