16 October 2024
This is the first post I’ve written in ages. I’m feeling rusty, but it’s good to be back in my happy place – here, spending time creating my website and doing my best to spread my work.
I’ve expanded a lot over the last two years in ways I’m still getting used to. Every time life throws us the biggest challenges, we are invited to evolve and grow, and also to break apart into tiny little pieces and lay in bed for days on end, and I have certainly been doing both.
This invitation to expand arrived through the experience of grief.
My Mum died almost a year ago now, on the 22nd of October 2023. She was 69. The year leading up to her death got really intense for me. It’s the first hugely hard thing I’ve navigated sober, and it was a really difficult experience, layered in with so many lessons that I welcomed and called in.
Here’s a little bit of background:
My Mum had cancer since 2016. Multiple myeloma – an incurable blood cancer. She had a stem call transplant in 2017, and was one of the lucky ones who got a few years of remission, then in 2021 she relapsed, and in 2022 a whole bunch of different chemos that she tried, suddenly didn’t work so well.
The last post I wrote about her illness (when she was still alive) – lives on my other website freqrising. It belongs there, as I wrote about experiencing it through two different lenses or ‘states of frequency’ – high-frequency me, and low-frequency me.
High-frequency me saw this as a sacred experience with great meaning that was teaching me many things I needed to know, and low-frequency me experienced it as cruel, painful, seriously depressing and pointless as hell. This is an update to that last post.
In May 2023 my Mum got sick with a stomach bug, something healthy people don’t normally get, but with her lowered immune system, it put her in hospital for two weeks. She spent Mother’s Day 2023 there, my sister and I hung out with her, we did her nails, we brought her slippers and socks, a card and chocolates, and tried to do typical Mother’s Day things, except we hung out in a cancer hospital – and the unspoken horror of what was happening weighed between us.
She got out after two weeks, but this time things were different. The chemo as well as the cancer began destroying the good parts of her blood, like the platelets and hemoglobin, and the cancer increasingly stopped responding to chemo.
It was such an emotional roller coaster, every few days she’d do bloods, they’d look slightly improved straight after chemo which would raise our hopes again – and two days later, the results were bad again. And I had to keep breaking this news to her, with my eternal optimism becoming more desperate each time. It got to the point over the next month or so, where the cancer became, what they termed, “very aggressive” and refractory (not responding to treatment).
I stopped writing on my website around this stage.
My focus turned to finding solutions. I became fixated on her blood results. My world became consumed with terminology I ‘d never even heard of, let alone knew what it meant. Horrid mouthfuls like nephrology, hypercalcemia, hyperkaemia, hypogammaglobulina, thrombocytopenia, cytotoxic.
I spent a great deal of time pouring over her complex blood test results several times a week working out how to get the abnormal results
better. I went with her to all her appointments, which by this stage was around twice a week for treatment, and blood transfusions. I’d leave in the morning when it was dark, and I’d get home at night when it was dark. It was exhausting for both of us, but it was still special, because it was the ONLY quality time we ever spent together.
I researched all her different medications and chemos and their many, horrible side effects. I researched different foods that helped to
improve iron, or helping increase kidney function, to natural remedies that help kill myeloma cells like curcumin and trying to nag my Mum on a regular basis to do these things.
My normal response to any intense situation is to learn as much as I can about it, so I can understand it, and therefore make informed
choices.
I was racing to learn, racing against sickness and death, which ultimately I had to surrender to. I was also battling my heart and my mind to accept the fact that I could not help her. I had to accept the fact that there is NOTHING I could do to ease her suffering.
She died obviously, so my hundreds of hours spent researching and nagging didn’t work, so many of these hours were spent literally with steam coming out of my ears, tears rolling down my cheeks, shredded tissues all over my floor, my heart breaking, trying to understand the situation.
In late August she got admitted to hospital again, this time because her kidney function had declined and her calcium was dangerously high (another sign of high myeloma load).
My brother came down from Queensland, the doctors called us all in and told us there weren’t any options left. They told us this in the hospital room on 31 August, which was a full moon, as well as my sister’s birthday.
She stayed in hospital for two weeks that time too. One day before she went home, her little dog Bobby, who she’d had for 17 years, walked up to my Step dad in the hallway, and laid down and died.
My sister and I went around to bury him the next day, but I cannot even write the depth of the anguish that my Mum was in. That she didn’t get to say goodbye to him. The unfairness that God was punishing her. What did she do wrong? Was she not worthy and loved by her God? (FYI this is definitely not my God).
I told her that God took him before she came home, because she would not have been able to care for him anymore. And this was true. He was a high special needs boy, and it was time for my Mum to put her last remaining energy into caring for her.
I somehow managed to turn this awful situation into a gift from God (she’s a super religious woman). And she saw it with new eyes, and I genuinely believe this timing of Bobby’s passing was a gift. A sad but necessary gift.
In September she went home. She started dialysis three times a week, for six hours each session. It kept her alive, but it made her sick. It gave her nausea, and headaches and chills from the sudden electrolyte imbalance that happens with dialysis. And this was life for a few weeks: She became increasingly quiet from them on.
I’m crying now writing this, I cried a lot then. She started texting us less, not able to keep up with my “Momma DRINK WATER” and “did you take your vitamins, did you take your medication” nagging texts. All my ‘it’s going to be okay’ texts stated going unanswered. She knew what was happening.
In early October, her specialist called me and told me her blood results over the phone. She didn’t want to talk to him and was avoiding his calls. Her blood results that showed the myeloma load was enormous. Her light-chains (a measure of myeloma load) were doubling every day. The myeloma was out of control. He told me as I was crying that they were stopping treatment and stopping dialysis, and she had about one week to live.
The next day my sister and I, and my step dad and Mum, we went to a hastily-arranged Palliative care appointment. The appointment was in the same area of Peter Mac where we had been so many times over the years. She and I had laughed so many times in that waiting room. Often we were getting good results. And today, we were here to plan her death.
She held my hand tightly in the appointment, and for the first time in my life, I let her. It was the only time we ever held hands. And we left Peter Mac for the final time.
That one week estimation, turned into almost three. Me, my sister and my Aunty (my Mum’s sister) stayed at my Mum’s house, sleeping (when we could) on the floor and on couches. My brother came down from Queensland, and I could write 1000 words on this time alone. It was so bloody strange and often very hard. On another hand, it was so full of love. My Mum was so brave.
Two days after my brother arrived, she died in his arms, she’d been waiting for him.
The few months after that were a blur. The funeral. Processing the unprocessable. We scattered her ashes on her 70th birthday in April 2024, 6 months after she died.
And since April, I’ve very slowly been emerging from the fog and finding my footing again. I’ve been remembering where I was before all this consumed me.
I’ve been unpacking so many layers of lessons. It broke my heart into so many little pieces and still does. But my heart has grown bigger. My sense of purpose with my work has been renewed and strengthened.
My reverence for the cycles of life, has been brought to the front of my awareness.
It’s now October – almost the first anniversary of her passing. I’ve spent the last few months drawing – my drawing style has changed. I’m working on a most precious piece, about grief. I’m receiving a clear understanding of what needs to be done in my own life to further expand myself, and my work.
And I am completely devoted to my purpose in this life: Using my past, to help free others.
It has been a profound time. Full of excruciating pain. Full of powerful synchronicity, symbols and magic (I’ll write about this soon). Everything I need to learn is coming to me, because I am calling it in.
So here I am. Changed, but in all the ways I always desired to be. I’m very excited to be back.
