Today’s UP CLOSE guest post comes from Sunny Smart.  Sunny is a stay-at-home mom with two part-time jobs, four full-time kids, and one fantastic husband. Those stats aren’t likely to change anytime soon. She loves to bake but hates to cook, loves cleanliness but dreads cleaning, wants to be a vegetarian but really loves steak, and thinks laughter makes the world go round. Most days she can be found consuming large amounts of caffeine, baking bread, and laughing with friends. She feels honored that Segullah is sharing her story.

I was fifteen when my father passed away. The doctors had told us three months previous we must make him comfortable and wait for the inevitable. It would be painful, we were told, but there would be plenty of drugs.

I remember the smell. Each day after school I checked on my father, emptied his urine and colostomy bags, swabbed his mouth with a wet sponge so he could swallow, checked his IV’s, moved his arms and legs to slow the painful atrophy. I remember when the black spots started appearing on his feet.

“He’s rotting,” our neighbor, a nurse, told me as I stood staring at his swollen, speckled feet. “His body is already dying and starting to decompose.” These may seem like harsh words to say to a young girl standing at the bed of her dying father, but I found them strangely comforting. Almost as if the moment I was dreading most would come in small increments and I wouldn’t be faced with losing him all at once.

I told myself I would choose to let go before I was forced to let go. A little distance now would ease the pain then. I could take care of him, but even in his rare moments of lucidity I would not spend any real time with him. This would keep me safe. I keenly remember wanting to hold him and tell him everything, and at the same time wishing I had never loved him.

Nothing could have prepared me for the instant reality fractured. In the exhalation of one breath and the not taking of another, in the smallest, most finite moment, my existence divided itself into two worlds: Before and After. How differently I would have treated my father if I had known before what I would feel after. The guilt and regret were almost too heavy to carry.

And God. Where was God? Who did He think He was? He had power to save my father, yet He chose not to. “The Lord must need him,” people would say. Need him? More than a fifteen-year-old girl needs her father? No. He was mean, cruel even. He hated me. I knew it. And I hated him back.

But time moved forward and the constant ache faded into an unexpected, ephemeral sting. My feelings for God changed as well. After a few years of intense struggle I realized I needed Him if I was ever going to find peace. Still, a bit of resentment always lingered. He’d always been a little harder on me than He needed to be. I was sure He loved me less.

I remember the phone call. “Honey,” came my mother’s voice, “it’s not good news.” She could have stopped there and I would have known that it was cancer, that despite all her protesting to the contrary, she wasn’t going to beat it. That my children were going to be personally acquainted with death. I knew I was facing the one thing for which I had been bracing myself in the seventeen years since my father’s death. The reason I had needed to hold my mother at arm’s length for so long.

Initially I did the only thing I knew how to do. I took care. I remembered how to be strong, talking openly with my mom and her doctor about her options, her fears, her possibilities. This part was easy. I began to steel myself for what I knew was coming. The baldness, the sickness, the lifting, the smell. I needed to remember how to do it all from a distance, to not let it affect me. I swallowed hard and braced.

But, walking into my mother’s hospital room after her first, almost fatal round of chemo, I couldn’t breathe. Swallow, I told myself. Choke it back down, whatever it is you’re feeling. I busied myself with doctors and family members, doing anything I could to avoid acknowledging the dying body before me.

That was August. The next time I saw my mother was May. How many excuses did it take to stay away that long? Bad weather, germs, an already strained relationship. It doesn’t matter really what the reasons were. I was distancing myself the way I had done with my father, to keep me and my children safe.

In May we saw her only briefly. She was a shell of herself, the chemo having ravaged her body and mind. I withdrew more, not wanting to open my heart to someone I could see was dying.

In mid June the call came. “They found a tumor in her brain,” my brother told me.

“How long?” I asked, ever collecting facts and tangibles. They weren’t sure. Well, I figured, two or three months, then it would all be over.

Two weeks after the phone call, the feeling washed over me like a wave: “Call your mother. Tell her you love her and you’re sorry you’ve been so selfish.” Yes, I should call my mother, but the one thing I could never be in front of her was wrong. And she wasn’t lucid anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

I was thirty-three when my mother passed away. Just two days after the feeling came to call her. Oh how I wish I had listened! The peace it might have given her to know that her baby loved her, that there wasn’t something more she should have done. That this woman who had known so much of loss had not also lost a daughter. I could have told her I loved her all these years, how much I didn’t want her to die, that I wanted her to watch me raise my babies. I could have let her be my mother one last time.

And what of God? If you had asked me, I would have told you I didn’t believe in a God who causes and directs events in our lives, yet I believed that God was somehow behind the tragedies in my life. It was as if He had singled me out to learn a lesson I had obviously failed to learn, and He was still punishing me. I found it nearly impossible to turn to Him.

Not long after my mother’s death, a friend told me a story in which he equated a tender moment with his father with the love of his Heavenly Father. Not a new idea, but in that moment something changed. I could sense the possibility of a Heavenly Father who really did love me in all the tender ways my earthly father had. I felt my heart crack open and in a pure outpouring I felt my Father in Heaven’s love flow into my heart and fill it up. For the first time in eighteen years, I felt free to grieve my father. The fear of unquenchable pain was gone. My mind flooded both with sweet memories of my dad and remembrances of important times he had missed, as if remembering him allowed me to share those moments with him. He didn’t feel far at all. I knew that that was how it always could have been. If I had truly turned to my Heavenly Father He would have shown me how to grieve and how to be whole. It all could have been different.

And now I am just beginning, a year after my mother’s death, to properly grieve her. To remember her. I realize now how often I have avoided speaking or even thinking of her. I have tried to push her away, hoping there would be no pain and that I could assuage my guilt. How could I not realize that in the moment I open myself up to her the guilt vanishes into gratitude and the pain begins to feel more like love?

I miss my mama. I miss her laughter and her compassion and the way she could take up a cause and run without ever looking back. She taught me to see the humor in almost anything, to stand up and be counted, to speak my mind, to look for ways to serve, to enjoy the little things. I have spent my life cataloguing the ways she was wrong and all the reasons she didn’t deserve my friendship, but the truth is, my best qualities are hers.

I’m beginning to see that the distance between hearts quantifies the pain we experience when separated. I see now that I’ve robbed my own children in many ways. Yes, I have loved them. I have rocked my babies and loved them so much it stole my breath. And yet, I have held back. To protect them, I tell myself, so they won’t miss me so much when I’m gone. Only now am I beginning to see that the more our hearts are knit together, the less we are separated by death.

Related posts:

1. Knowing Father
2. A Limited Perspective
3. Wanted: Voices from the Dust