Dara’s Story

A few weeks after I had my first child, my mom passed away from stage 4 cancer. This strange twist of fate has been one of the greatest challenges of my life. As a new mom, I found myself feeling elated at having a new baby, and devastated from the loss of my mom. I wasn’t sure how to navigate this situation, and found myself struggling. It was hard for me to accept what had happened, give myself permission to feel the pain, and make peace with my mom’s death. Instead of asking for help or giving myself the space to deal with the loss, I pretended like I was fine. I put on a happy face, convinced myself everything was OK, and tried to be the happy mom I felt my daughter deserved. “I’m fine,” I would say when people asked me how I was. But, I knew the truth. I was the farthest thing from being fine. I distracted myself, focused on raising my family, and tried to push the sadness away.

Time went by, I was blessed with two daughters, and did my best to help them form a relationship with my mom. It was important to me that they get a sense of who she was. I didn’t want them to just see her picture, I wanted my daughters to know the woman she was. I talked a lot about my mom, over the years, and searched for a way to bring her into our lives. Every year on the anniversary of my mom’s death and her birthday, we had ice cream sundaes, something my mom adored, as a way to celebrate my mom. This helped my daughters connect with her. We would eat our sundaes, and I would share stories of my mom. My daughters loved this.

It’s been twenty years since my mom’s death, and my daughters are now twenty-one and eighteen. When I look back on the years since my mom’s death, I recognize that I was “stuck” in my grief for a long time. My sadness became all-consuming and got in the way of my enjoyment of the present moment. I allowed grief to take a seat at the head of my table, where it stayed for way too long. I didn’t see it then, of course, because I was so stuck in my pain. You would have thought I learned from my mom’s death, to make the most out of each day, but somehow I missed this lesson.

This is hard to admit, but it’s the honest truth. Instead of focusing on what I had, I focused on what I had lost.

I’m older now, and have learned to give my younger self a lot of grace and compassion. I did the best I could at that time, and I don’t fault myself for being “stuck” in grief or not knowing how to navigate the situation.

Thanks to a random discovery of a bag of letters, written to me when I first when to summer camp at age nine, until I graduated from college, mostly from my mom, I was finally able to make peace with her death and give myself permission to be happy. Reading these letters, I could hear my mom’s voice, feel her personality, and I got a dose of her wisdom and guidance.

So many times over the past twenty years, I longed to talk with my mom, ask her questions, reminisce, and share with her things that only a mom would understand. These letters gave me a glimpse into the woman she was, and from my adult perspective, helped me get to know my mom a little bit better. They also showed me how much my mom valued life, and gave me a much needed dose of her guidance. It was almost as if she was saying to me, “Go back to the business of living your life, enough already.”

What I’ve learned from personal experience and from talking with so many people is that you can’t run from grief. You can try to distract yourself and pretend it isn’t there, keep yourself busy and try not to think about it, but this will only delay the inevitable. It also doesn’t matter how old you are when you lose someone you love. Whether you’re a twenty-something daughter trying to move forward after the loss of your mom or a seventy-something widow trying to figure out how to live in the world without your partner. Losing someone you love hurts.

It takes time to learn how to deal with the pain and move forward. It takes a willingness to allow yourself to feel pain, let it move through you, and then commit to moving forward, remembering that it’s okay to be happy again. It takes acceptance of the situation, and an understanding that you can’t do anything to change the circumstances you find yourself in. What you can do, however, is change the way you look at the hand you’ve been dealt. You can decide to focus on what you had, not what you lost. It isn’t easy, but incredibly important.

When you lose someone you love, intentionally allow yourself time to feel the pain and sadness, but do everything you can to push yourself back into the land of the living. Not only do you deserve this, but your loved one would want you to do this. This was the greatest message I received when reading the letters. I know my mom would never have wanted me to spend my precious life being stuck in grief.

While I miss my mom and grandmothers everyday, they are still with me, their presence pulling at my heartstrings, but now in a good way. My dad always says, “Don’t be sad it’s over; be happy it happened.” He typically says this when we’ve had a visit with each other and I’m sad it’s time to say good-bye. These are wise words that I try to remember when I find myself missing my mom. Don’t be sad she isn’t here, Dara, I whisper to myself, Count your blessings that you had her for as long as you had her.

DARA KURTZ, after being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-two, left her twenty-year career as a personal banker and financial advisor to focus on writing, speaking, and podcasting. Today her personal blog, Crazy Perfect Life (www.crazyperfectlife.com), reaches over 180,000 followers. Dara is the author of three books, Crush Cancer: Personal Enlightenment from a Cancer Survivor, Crush Cancer Workbook, and her recent book, I am My Mother’s Daughter: Wisdom on Life, Loss, and Love.  Dara’s goal is to use her life experiences to help people strengthen their relationships and create more happiness and joy in their everyday lives.