Recognizing My Mom’s Mortality

I don’t want to finish this book.

I only want to reread the good parts—

the chapters before all this—

and leave the future far, far away.

(excerpt from “Fading into Bloom“)

In scuba diving, it’s generally not a good thing to panic while you’re underwater. Panicked divers tend to rip off their masks and even their regulators (that’s the thing you breathe out of). And being without air at any depth isn’t exactly ideal.

Before panic sets in, there’s a very distinct feeling. Squirmy, startling, sudden.

Uh oh, I don’t think I like this.

Nope, I don’t like this at all.

I don’t wanna be here. Someone get me out of here.

Get me out of here NOW!

Now, you can regain control with a couple of techniques, and ideally, you’ve practiced techniques before your dive to help you prevent a total mid-dive panic.

But that gritty, unpleasant, pre-panic feeling where your body feels that something is wrong and your brain starts reacting on autopilot, and you just wanna make it go away and get back to baseline, back to normal, back to safety—that feeling is one to be reckoned with.

It’s the same feeling I felt when my mom’s condition (Primary Progressive Aphasia) started becoming very tangible, very real. When I realized I couldn’t have a normal conversation with her…or any conversation at all.

(Uh oh, I don’t think I like this.)

I didn’t want to be in that situation, I didn’t want to feel those feelings, I didn’t want to see it through. I didn’t want to admit that there would be an end or think about how close we were getting to it.

(Nope, I don’t like this at all.)

And I admit that I went into full panic mode after that and coped (or didn’t) by drowning myself in work every waking hour of the day for a period of months, but that’s a different story.

(Get me out of here NOW!)

But another coping mechanism I developed during the initial post-denial stage was to replay the good memories I had with her. I found immense comfort in recalling the happy days and moments we’d shared during my childhood and in my (fairly recent) early twenties.

Of course, unlike in my hobby of scuba diving, I’d had no prior way to practice techniques to reel myself back from the acute pain of starting to lose my mom. So, I felt the pain, more or less, and simply ignored the future for a while, choosing instead to swim in peaceful memories and not think about one day washing up on the shore of this story’s end.

Fading into Bloom is my bite-sized collection of poems on this topic that you can find right here.