I really start to look at things when I lose family members. I was supposed to drive my father to see my aunt one last time before she was to pass, but she passed before we were able to make the trip to see her. She has been battling cancer for a few years and there was nothing left to do. I just got back from her memorial in Wenatchee over the holiday weekend.

Life is precious and short.

Since the spring of 2014, I have lost four family members. Two uncles, my aunt, and my mother. All I have left now are my father, brother and various cousins.

Death doesn’t really hit home until it’s a bit closer to you. Closer in the sense of parents or friends. I was in yoga teacher training when a high school friend who fought breast cancer for several years passed away in 2013. It kinda hit me in the face when I lost people in my own age category. A year later I lost another high school friend to breast cancer. And of course I lost my mother in 2014.

What starts to creep in with death is how short and precious life really is. I feel like I belong to the “incredible shrinking family” these days. At the same time I have seen my husband lose all three of his siblings in a matter of six years. He faced a tremendous amount of loss before I really had loss on a similar scale.

It’s hard to relate to loss if it hasn’t really happened to you, yet. I have a dear friend who lives out of state who lost her mother 20 years ago. At the time it happened, I was supportive, but not at all able to really be truly of support because I had no concept of what it was that she was going through. I was in the middle of grad school at the time, and I spoke to her about it a couple of times, but I was not able to really comprehend what had happened, or the toll of caring for a sick parent has on a person.

For about a year and a half I was pulled in to care for my mother, who began to decline in late 2012, and really took a downward turn in 2013, and ended in the spring of 2014. The process of caring for a sick parent is one of the most draining, never ending, emotional roller coasters I have ever been on in my life. It consumed most of my time and energy, and being the intuitive person I am, I knew how it would end.

The hardest part was trying to help my mother when I knew none of it would end up the right direction. Nothing was more heartbreaking than to see my mother cry in the hospital because her brain wasn’t working right because she was severely anemic and/or dehydrated, and scared, and in pain. Just like she did for me as a kid, I wanted to do for the same for her and that was to make everything go away that was causing pain and fear.

Grief for losing a loved one really never really stops. It goes through various stages. One stage it’s just right in your face daily. Other stages it recedes but creeps in unexpectedly at the oddest of times. Other stages of grief include feeling the loss of things that did not happen in that relationship while that person was still here.

I have really had a lot of that experience because my mother struggled mightily with clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, and addiction. Our relationship was not always the best, particularly when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s did things seem to get to a point where I did not react to her issues the same way anymore. So a lot of my grieving process has been about feeling loss from all of the things I wish she and I COULD have had together, but did not due to these other issues getting in the way.

I spent a lot of time working on my own issues in order to be able to have a better relationship with her later in my life, and for that work, I am so grateful.

Even though my mother broke my heart a thousand times because she herself was broken, and sometimes it was pretty rough, all of that seems so irrelevant now because she is not here. I am so glad I was able to walk through some very difficult times in order to have more of the relationship I always wanted with her before I lost her.

In the end, I found peace with her, and I knew she loved me. There were so many times in my life as a kid when I thought how could this person be so incredibly mean? She can’t possibly love me to be this mean. Really what was happening is she was showing the world how broken, angry, and sad she was with her borderline behavior and her alcohol addiction, and it really had nothing to do with me.

What was I able to do? Move to compassion. And forgive. I cannot begin to explain the tremendous gift in the ability to experience compassion and forgiveness. Compassion and forgiveness leads to freedom and love.

My mother spent her entire life looking backwards, and beating the crap out of herself for things she said or did due to her mental illness and addiction. She could not let go of past events, even though I already had. It’s like the never ending cycle of shame and feeling bad about something, and continuing to focus on it, which reinforces mental patterns that get ingrained, and are very difficult to change. Sometimes people can change them, and sometimes they cannot.

In the end I know there was peace and love and forgiveness.

Death offers an opening of sorts I have discovered. Every time I have lost someone, I learn so much more about them. It comes from the conversations of those of us left behind. In those conversations I know the memory of those lost will live on forever.