High school student Daniel cheers describes how his reaction to his mother's death from cancer turned from shock and stoicism to confusion and guilt.I’d always been closest to my mum. She would help me with tricky assignment ,fashion advise, and although she never had the chance I know she would have loved to have fixed my girl troubles. Her calming influence is something I’ll sorely miss this year during my final year of high school. But my love for my mother got a bit lost in the chaos of my early teens. I knew I could depend on her for love and support, and there was a hug waiting for me every day when I got home from school, but between schoolwork and social dramas I never found the time to truly value her. I suppose this was the foundation of my fear that I didn’t care enough.
The first hint that Mum was no longer invincible came when I went with my parents to a medical centre where they did MRIs, one of the many terms whi
ch, at the point, I had only experienced on TV. Even now I feel distant from it, as through a part of me still believes that tragedy happens in everyone else’s family. I sat in the waiting room and watched Maybe Diva win her third Melbourne Cup [in 2005], and so began the semi-nomadic existence that was to be our lives for the next six months. School.waiting room, hospital rooms, intensive care unit (yuck) and finally back home to sleep. Mum and dad sat my sister and I down at the kitchen bench and told us Mum had a tumour in her hip. Words like benign and malig
nant were mentioned, life-changing words, although I didn’t realise that at the time. I didn’t panic; I didn’t have any reason to worry. The doctors would biopsy it and fix it and it’d be cool, just another event for Mum to get the family through.It’s been a tradition in our family to navigate Sydney in relation to cake shops. Destinations were near or on the way to patisseries. That was how our lives operated; leisurely enough that cake played a major role. By the time Mum had been sick for a few months, Sydney was instead a series of hospitals and medical centres. Cakes became less important. I won an award at presentation day the year Mum was sick. I didn’t realise she was there at the time, but I can imagine now my heroic year adviser ensuring that my parents were seated well before the rush of students, in a spot next to the door in case mum was sick. Every prize since then has brought Dad to tears and hug we share in that moment is always emotional. My school result take on a new meaning when he says she’d be proud of me. Mum was staying in hospital for a week or so while she recovered from a spinal operation, but the week became months and soon I was accustomed to having no parent at home. My younger sister and I learnt to cook and, essentially, how to look after ourselves. This was a revolutionary notion to us, a pair of heavily parented kids.When given the option, I always chose to hear the medical details of what was happening to Mum. If I knew what was happening in scientific, obj
ective terms it was easy for me to assume that the doctors would be able to fix it. Once I’d made the unknown known it stopped being scary. In retrospect, I think that by hearing Mum’s illness described in medical terms I could distance myself from it. I could still believe on some level that it wasn’t my mother they were talking about. Once Mum started to deteriorate, she asked to be told in advance if my sister and I were coming. She’d go to great lengths to ensure that her usually pale face was made up with help from the nurses. It was her way of making sure we never saw her at her weakest. Although at the time I might not have, now I appreciate this small effort. No child should have cancer and treatments.Because of the cancer, the woman who made the family what it was – who would keep us together in any disaster, whether it was chickenpox or alien invasion – now could only wince at the bump caused by my poor wheelchair-steering or, after an apparently successful operation, lie unconscious, attached to a machine that breathed for her.Even the friendliest nurses could not remove the atmosphere of helplessness and illness that for me filled every hospital. Standing in the corridors I once witnessed a pair of nurses wheel a sheet-covered body from an adjacent room. They glanced at me guiltily and I knew that this wasn’t something they wanted me to see. To be confronted with death, at this late stage of my mum’s cancer, was a haunting experience. I couldn’t help but see the same thing happened to Mum.The day it happened I had been to visit her in hospital. She’d been getting better – I even announced to my friends that my mum would come home soon and it was all going to be OK – but over the last week everything had gone downhill rapidly. I suppo
se that cancer. I spend a long time at her bedside and although she was a sleep I held her hand, something I didn’t often do. At one point she woke up hand snatched her hand away. I can only guess, but I don’t think she was ready for me to start making the most of our remaining time together. Once she’d fallen asleep again I began to leave but I paused at the door and said, “I love you.” I’m so glad I did.That night, Dad came home and told us that she had died. Neither my sister nor I wanted to see her body, choosing to remember her as she was alive. The three of us violently embraced, determined never to let each other go, as though if we held on tight enough we wouldn’t lose anyone else. We spent the rest of the night in front of mindless sitcoms, sitting through episode after episode rather that deal with the alternative. Over the next week we planned the funeral and caught up on lost sleep between visits from family and friends. We didn’t have time to realise she’d never be there again.The small speech I’d prepared for her funeral must have been barely hundred words, but I can remember standing ,shaking at the pulpit for an eternity. My dad had always maintained that a speech should ‘make ‘em laugh and make ‘em cry” , a saying I was thankful for when the audience’s laughter gave me slight reprieve. But it wasn’t until after I’d sat down that I stopped shaking. I’d always turned to my mum for help with speeches, anything written. She had been, among many things, an author and had read to me since I was two weeks old. I was moving to the rhythm of Crocodile Beat before I could due, at least partially, to her. The wake was a mess of second and third cousins I had never met before and haven’t seen since. Distant family members used it as an opportunity to cat
ch up with each other, or tell me I was a poet-a title I was more than happy to receive; any link between mum and me was something to be treasured. The Distance that had grown between my mother and I while she was sick meant that to me, she could still be lying in bed at the hospital. Bu
t after a week of people telling me how sorry they were, it began to sink in. The shock of the first weeks gradually became confusion and guilt about how I had reacted. I felt I wasn’t as upset as everyone else because I hadn’t cried. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why did I cope with it so well? Why didn’t I need counselling like the rest of my family? Why wouldn’t I cry? I felt like I must not have valued her enough. I’ve been told numerous times that people grieve differently. But that didn’t prevent me doubting the strength of my love for my mother.It was especially confusing because, since my mum’s death, my life had become suddenly easier. There were no more takeaway dinners in front of hospital TVs or homework in waiting rooms and no Intensive Care Units, which to me were full of machines, tubes and beeps more terrifying that an invisible cancer. After six months of that hospital smell ,it was a relief to know I didn’t have to go back. And that only made me feel guilty. Within weeks I could return to a life of relative normality, but I hated to think that things could be normal without my mum, as though this was an in
sult to her.Just to make me feel worse, I couldn’t help but think t
hat I had become a better person because of my time without her. I was more independent and mature, but I didn’t want to be stronger because of her death. I wanted it to make me feel terrible and weak, but the six months of her cancer had prepared me for her death. All I can do is remember that there were things she hadn’t yet taught me, wisdom she still had to impart. As I’ve grown older, the hardest part of her death has been that I never got to know her as an equal. To me she was a super here, just my mum, without fault. Had she been around for longer I would have been able to see her as a person with her own weaknesses and love her in a completely new way. Even in the last six months, despite no longer being invincible, she still wasn’t quite human. She didn’t have faults, she had cancer.
ch, at the point, I had only experienced on TV. Even now I feel distant from it, as through a part of me still believes that tragedy happens in everyone else’s family. I sat in the waiting room and watched Maybe Diva win her third Melbourne Cup [in 2005], and so began the semi-nomadic existence that was to be our lives for the next six months. School.waiting room, hospital rooms, intensive care unit (yuck) and finally back home to sleep. Mum and dad sat my sister and I down at the kitchen bench and told us Mum had a tumour in her hip. Words like benign and malig
nant were mentioned, life-changing words, although I didn’t realise that at the time. I didn’t panic; I didn’t have any reason to worry. The doctors would biopsy it and fix it and it’d be cool, just another event for Mum to get the family through.It’s been a tradition in our family to navigate Sydney in relation to cake shops. Destinations were near or on the way to patisseries. That was how our lives operated; leisurely enough that cake played a major role. By the time Mum had been sick for a few months, Sydney was instead a series of hospitals and medical centres. Cakes became less important. I won an award at presentation day the year Mum was sick. I didn’t realise she was there at the time, but I can imagine now my heroic year adviser ensuring that my parents were seated well before the rush of students, in a spot next to the door in case mum was sick. Every prize since then has brought Dad to tears and hug we share in that moment is always emotional. My school result take on a new meaning when he says she’d be proud of me. Mum was staying in hospital for a week or so while she recovered from a spinal operation, but the week became months and soon I was accustomed to having no parent at home. My younger sister and I learnt to cook and, essentially, how to look after ourselves. This was a revolutionary notion to us, a pair of heavily parented kids.When given the option, I always chose to hear the medical details of what was happening to Mum. If I knew what was happening in scientific, obj
ective terms it was easy for me to assume that the doctors would be able to fix it. Once I’d made the unknown known it stopped being scary. In retrospect, I think that by hearing Mum’s illness described in medical terms I could distance myself from it. I could still believe on some level that it wasn’t my mother they were talking about. Once Mum started to deteriorate, she asked to be told in advance if my sister and I were coming. She’d go to great lengths to ensure that her usually pale face was made up with help from the nurses. It was her way of making sure we never saw her at her weakest. Although at the time I might not have, now I appreciate this small effort. No child should have cancer and treatments.Because of the cancer, the woman who made the family what it was – who would keep us together in any disaster, whether it was chickenpox or alien invasion – now could only wince at the bump caused by my poor wheelchair-steering or, after an apparently successful operation, lie unconscious, attached to a machine that breathed for her.Even the friendliest nurses could not remove the atmosphere of helplessness and illness that for me filled every hospital. Standing in the corridors I once witnessed a pair of nurses wheel a sheet-covered body from an adjacent room. They glanced at me guiltily and I knew that this wasn’t something they wanted me to see. To be confronted with death, at this late stage of my mum’s cancer, was a haunting experience. I couldn’t help but see the same thing happened to Mum.The day it happened I had been to visit her in hospital. She’d been getting better – I even announced to my friends that my mum would come home soon and it was all going to be OK – but over the last week everything had gone downhill rapidly. I suppo
se that cancer. I spend a long time at her bedside and although she was a sleep I held her hand, something I didn’t often do. At one point she woke up hand snatched her hand away. I can only guess, but I don’t think she was ready for me to start making the most of our remaining time together. Once she’d fallen asleep again I began to leave but I paused at the door and said, “I love you.” I’m so glad I did.That night, Dad came home and told us that she had died. Neither my sister nor I wanted to see her body, choosing to remember her as she was alive. The three of us violently embraced, determined never to let each other go, as though if we held on tight enough we wouldn’t lose anyone else. We spent the rest of the night in front of mindless sitcoms, sitting through episode after episode rather that deal with the alternative. Over the next week we planned the funeral and caught up on lost sleep between visits from family and friends. We didn’t have time to realise she’d never be there again.The small speech I’d prepared for her funeral must have been barely hundred words, but I can remember standing ,shaking at the pulpit for an eternity. My dad had always maintained that a speech should ‘make ‘em laugh and make ‘em cry” , a saying I was thankful for when the audience’s laughter gave me slight reprieve. But it wasn’t until after I’d sat down that I stopped shaking. I’d always turned to my mum for help with speeches, anything written. She had been, among many things, an author and had read to me since I was two weeks old. I was moving to the rhythm of Crocodile Beat before I could due, at least partially, to her. The wake was a mess of second and third cousins I had never met before and haven’t seen since. Distant family members used it as an opportunity to cat
ch up with each other, or tell me I was a poet-a title I was more than happy to receive; any link between mum and me was something to be treasured. The Distance that had grown between my mother and I while she was sick meant that to me, she could still be lying in bed at the hospital. Bu
t after a week of people telling me how sorry they were, it began to sink in. The shock of the first weeks gradually became confusion and guilt about how I had reacted. I felt I wasn’t as upset as everyone else because I hadn’t cried. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why did I cope with it so well? Why didn’t I need counselling like the rest of my family? Why wouldn’t I cry? I felt like I must not have valued her enough. I’ve been told numerous times that people grieve differently. But that didn’t prevent me doubting the strength of my love for my mother.It was especially confusing because, since my mum’s death, my life had become suddenly easier. There were no more takeaway dinners in front of hospital TVs or homework in waiting rooms and no Intensive Care Units, which to me were full of machines, tubes and beeps more terrifying that an invisible cancer. After six months of that hospital smell ,it was a relief to know I didn’t have to go back. And that only made me feel guilty. Within weeks I could return to a life of relative normality, but I hated to think that things could be normal without my mum, as though this was an in
sult to her.Just to make me feel worse, I couldn’t help but think t
hat I had become a better person because of my time without her. I was more independent and mature, but I didn’t want to be stronger because of her death. I wanted it to make me feel terrible and weak, but the six months of her cancer had prepared me for her death. All I can do is remember that there were things she hadn’t yet taught me, wisdom she still had to impart. As I’ve grown older, the hardest part of her death has been that I never got to know her as an equal. To me she was a super here, just my mum, without fault. Had she been around for longer I would have been able to see her as a person with her own weaknesses and love her in a completely new way. Even in the last six months, despite no longer being invincible, she still wasn’t quite human. She didn’t have faults, she had cancer.Writer: Daniel Cheers
The Weekend Australian Magazine
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Askm....Saya menghantar 3 orang anak saya di CIC, Seksyen 5 Kota damansara di mana fee nya mencapai 1430 sebulan. Tiada package istimewa ke utk kami...
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