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Choosing to Live a Legacy
By Vanessa Sanders
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| Photo: Dreamstime |
It never occurred to me that my mom, as strong as she was, would leave this world so suddenly. After fighting a battle she couldn’t win, her second round of chemo took her life when she was 46. I was barely 17.
My greatest fear since I was little was that my best friend, my hero and my security—my mother—would die. That fear became a fact, but it didn’t kill me. I didn’t let it become a disease like the cancer that took my mom’s life.
A couple of days before my mom died, she told me, “Take care of your dad, your brothers and my sister.” “Don’t say that,” I said. “You’re not gonna die.” Holding each other, we cried, never wanting to let go. “But Mom, who will take care of me?” We both wailed, and my mom held me tighter. “Oh, my baby,” she said, “You’re strong like me.”
I can’t say I was so strong that her passing came easily; it was the hardest struggle in my life. But I knew the struggle would pass because God was my help. I went through all the normal phases of grief: doubt and disbelief, denial, anger, depression, hope and finding my identity. After some months, I sought counsel from a sweet, middle-aged woman named Dorothy, a licensed counselor whom I consider an angel. Through her suggestive therapy and understanding, I was able to face the grief in a healthy way.
After a year and some months, I rounded off my stages of grief, ready to face life head on. I had an identity again and knew I could live a full, meaningful life without my mother’s physical presence but with her strength and memory.
Since I’ve been over the grief, I have thought of my mother many days, but I admit there have been days when I didn’t think of her. I’ve been too busy enjoying the life God has for me without letting the tragedy of her loss steal my joy or stop me in my tracks. Mom would be proud. After all, she overcame some tracks in her time. Not long ago I studied a picture of her when she was 16 with her head poking up over a tall railroad trestle through some tracks. I couldn’t help laughing.
Treasuring Mom
A couple of weeks ago my dad gave me some old pictures of my mother I had never seen. They were snapshots of mom with her friends and boyfriends during her teen years. I couldn’t help staring in awe at pictures of her talking on the phone in her room with friends and dressed up to go to a sweetheart dance with her boyfriend. I had to laugh at pictures of her straddling atop a high tree stump with her hair ratted like a nest, dressed up like an Arabian using her best friend as her horse, and making silly faces in a photo booth with her best friend. I couldn’t ignore that the pictures reminded me of me.
The pictures were so full of life—her life—that I had to make an album out of them. It wasn’t until I was done constructing the album that my joyful mood plummeted. I realized again that the brightest, strongest person I ever knew was missing from my life. I realized how much my mom always understood me more than anyone else and that it was because I was so much like her. Knowing this, I needed her more than ever. This ached, and although I felt she was with me, I wanted her beside me.
I wanted her here to talk to and make me laugh like she always used to do. I wanted her to know my boyfriend and to be here when I marry and have kids. I wanted her to know me now, at this age, so she could see how much I’ve grown and matured. If only I were this understanding and this grown up before she left.
Maybe that’s one reason she left—I needed to grow up.
Then I cried, and cried again. I recalled Dorothy’s words: “You will never fully get over her. There will be days when you least expect it, and something will trigger the memory of your mother, and you might shed some tears or get down, but it will pass.”
Dorothy was right. I closed the album and laid it on my coffee table for all to see (and for me to look through every once in a while). Then I glanced through some goofy pictures of me and my best friend, then did nothing new. I dusted myself off, got up and kept moving, knowing the void she left will still ache at times. And that’s okay.
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