DefSufi

My mother died this past Thursday. My husband and I were in Vegas, our first "to ourselves" vacation in more than 5 years. When we left, my mother was in hospice, with the expectation that the doctors would get her pain under control, and she could go back home after about a week, where she would spend the rest of the months that she had left.

But God had other plans, and on Thursday, when I walked into the hotel room and saw the flashing message light, I didn't even have to think about what it was for.

Growing up, I had a real love-hate relationship with my mum. She "had issues" as we say now, and they made her insecure, sometimes shrewish, often selfish.... traits that I also have learnt, and thankfully learnt to identify before they get more than a few words/actions into gear. When we first found out that not only did she have cancer, but that it was already stage 4+, I started to grieve then. I knew that it would be less than a year, and that it could get VERY ugly before it was over. I went through the "Oh shit, my mother is going to DIE!" to the "I didn't really ever even like her anyway", to deciding I DID really like her, and then just being sad for her that it was going to be so hard. Chemo. Radiation. Gamma knife. PET scan, MRI, X-ray, bone scan...over and over again.

There were good days... I took her out to shop for clothes just a few days before she went into hospice, and she was hurting but otherwise feeling quite well. And there were bad days.... early on, just after her first chemo treatment, she nearly died from what one doctor thought was over-medication which made her look and act like she had only a few days. People at the hospital were wanting to wearhouse her out to hospice at that point, and had we not all rallied around her, I imagine that it would have happened. And that it would have been a premature end for her.

She got out of hospital and rehab 10 weeks later, on her 78th birthday.

The past 5 years or so we had quite a different relationship from what we had when I was a kid. We could actually talk without one of us bursting into tears or screaming in anger. "I'm so glad we get along now", she said that last day we went shopping. "I guess we both just had to get older", I answered back. "Yep, and I'm glad we did it fast, I was beginning to lose patience", she said.

It was a long way from several years ago, when thinking about what the Prophet (pbuh) said, that heaven is at the feet of the mother. "He didn't know my mother!" was my first thought. But then again, maybe he "did". One thing that Islam taught me is that respect and loving attention are due some relationships even if you don't want to do it. In the winning video from Link TV last year, one of the people in the video is holding up a sign that reads "I visit my parents every weekend....even though they drive me INSANE!" I KNOW that feeling! But even acting out of obligation rather than affection, evetually, it led to the affection that I should have had as a kid. I grew to respect and even love my parents. Finally.

I miss my mum. But I know that she's moved on to the next life, and that her body no longer is in unendurable pain.

And so although I mourn her loss, I do so also with a sense of relief for her.

And I know I'll see her when it's my turn to cross over.

Blessings.