So my Mum died. This is my first post back in AGES.

This is the first post I’ve written in nearly two years…. and 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 little pieces and lay in bed for days on end, and I have certainly done both.

This invitation to expand came in the lesson of grief.

My Mum died almost a year ago now. 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 – was when she was still alive – lives on my other website freqrising. It belongs there, as I wrote about experiencing it through two different states of frequency – high frequency me, and low frequency me. High frequency me saw this as a sacred experience with great meaning, and low frequency me experienced it as cruel, painful and pointless as hell. Have a read if you wish. 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 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 numbers 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. Words I’d be happy to never hear again.

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 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 her God was punishing her. What did she do wrong? Was she not worthy and loved by her 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 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 highly religious woman). 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 every second day, for six hours. It kept her alive. But it made her sick, it gave her nausea, and headaches and chills. And this was life for a few weeks: Traveling to a dismal hospital, 3 times a week for 6 hours a day dialysis. 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 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. Her blood results that showed the myeloma load, were astronomical. They were doubling every day. The myeloma was out of control. He told me as I was crying that they were stopping treatment, and she had about one week to live.

The next day me, my sister and my step dad and Mum, we went to a Pallative care appointment. The appointment was in the same area of Peter Mac, 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 three. Me, my sister and my Aunty (my Mum’s sister) stayed here, my brother came down from QLD which I could write 1000 words on this time alone. It was so bloody hard. On another hand, so full of love.

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 70^th 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 here renewed and strengthened.

My reverence for the cycles of life, has been brought to the front of my awareness.

I also have the awareness that we all process death differently. Many people do not process death like I do – and see the sacredness in the passing. They are stuck in suffering. In the loss. In grief, or perhaps pushing grief away because it’s so big. And therefore creating shadows, as I know well. When something is not faced in the light of awareness, but pushed away, and mutates and grows in the shadows.

It’s now October – it’s almost the first anniversary of her passing. I have spent the last few months drawing – and my drawing style has changed. I’m working on a most precious piece, about grief. I am getting clear understanding of what needs to be done in my own life to expand further, and with 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 synchonoicity, symbols and magic (I’ll write about this soon). Exactly what I need to learn is coming to me.

So here I am. Changed, but in all the ways I always desired to be. I’m very excited to be back.