by Todd Daigneault

Created on: November 08, 2009

My mother recently passed from stage IV lung cancer...Sadly enough, I had come to accept it. Death is part of life and life is part of death. But during her three years of cancer, we both had fought the battle. My mother, given a year to live, lived almost three-never going through any real pain and suffering breathing difficulties towards the end. Finally, one day she was gone, her glassy eyes staring back towards heaven. In the ensuing three months after, we all had come to terms with the reality of it, albeit in totally unpredictable ways. My oldest brother came to stay with my other older brother and I, setting off a bizarre series of events that lasted for months, and were all part of the mystical, almost magical pattern and cycle of death, dying-life, love and living-and acceptance of all these realities.

I guess we all coped in different ways. I resumed my writing, my mother often musing during those years of dying that I'd make it big as a writer after her death. My eldest brother, the scalawag of our mother's brood, continued to dream grandiose ideas of living in a state of luxury, without ever having to work to obtain it. He spun stories of things he allegedly did to us, the other two brothers, making us quietly chortle. I guess death can bring the worst and best out of families, as we struggle to deal with the death of a parent, and try to reach a level of acceptance along the way. With my eldest brother, he had spun tall stories for years. But my mother's death seemed to only bring a visual level of enhancement to these stories, as he tried to bring some degree of understanding of his own life along the way.

My sister, being a strong woman, but with a strong love that we all had for our mother grieved openly and quietly. We were prepared for three years...But even if we had thirty years notice, it would never be enough. However, we all grasped the reality of it, differently and the same. Being marred by sudden tragedy is like fighting to prevent yourself from downing in water, as your nose just bobs above the surface. We start grasping our own mortality, being middle-aged. Generally, once your elderly parent is gone, you start hearing the death rattle and start wondering when its your turn.

Every ache and pain from a body just starting to decline becomes far more acute to one's senses. Death, so far away, is suddenly just sitting beside you. Reality becomes a real thing, not the fleeting, sometimes illusory things of youth. My brother spun one story after another, still envisaging having luxury items that he could never afford, or even save for. I, being the pragmatist of the family, tried to center him during those dark days after my mother's death...but knew in my heart that this was part of the cycle of transition and change that we were all irrevocably chained to.

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