Train of change

How many times can you pinpoint the exact moment - the hour, the minute, the evening or day - your life changed? Where with retrospection, you can see the figurative gears chug into motion, one set of toothed wheels slowly turning until the first link is made, and then the second, and then before you know it, this train of change is speeding up and on track ready to derail life as you know it, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Change is inevitable, both good and bad. Every day it happens, but there are extraordinary moments of change that simply shake you up with such force you’re never able to put your pieces back together in their original shape. The edges of tumbling pieces dull over time, their corners rounding, and if you were to attempt returning them to their primary place, gaps would remain. Fissures have found their way in, and ultimately, your original form simply no longer exists. 

But that doesn’t mean you don’t. You still exist after this radical change. So you adapt and modify, make mistakes and work on them. Eventually you face your new fears and acclimatize to life after the severe change. It’s a metamorphosis. It’s terrifying. It’s ugly, maddening and sad. It’s profoundly lonely. And it’s a journey only you can take, only you can truly work at, only you can decide to no longer feel a certain way because it’s miserable and affecting those closest to you no matter how hard you tried to not let it. Time is the only solution that works best.

I can look back four years ago to Oct. 26 and can clearly see, “Ah yes, that evening when I was wearing a red and white striped sweater at my Mum’s house where I made us dinner, and then brownies from a box in a yellow pyrex bowl that had a photogenic drip so I took a picture,” - that is the exact moment my life changed. Because my Mum wouldn’t eat much of the dinner or brownies I made, and she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, and she wouldn’t be able to stay awake to have a clear conversation. And she would suggest I call her doctor, who would suggest we call an ambulance and head to the hospital. This night, where I arbitrarily watched a couponing show on Netflix in a green recliner chair, so naively thinking that whatever had been ailing Mum up to this point would be something from which she could recover or adapt, this night where I was not scared following her ambulance or entering a hospital because she overcame so much already in 61 years - this is the night where the first link was made in those wheels of change. Eight days later, on Nov. 3, 2012 at 9:33 p.m., mere seconds after her sister, who helped our family in a months-long round-the-clock system of care had driven back from New York and entered her hospital room, Mum would die, surrounded by my dads, her best friend, her cousin, and her sister, holding my hand. I would hear her taking her last breaths, watch her take that final one, and feel her hand grow cold. It was the most traumatizing, literally traumatizing, week of my life. And then that train of change took me on the rockiest ride of my life yet. 

Every year on this day, this anniversary, I reflect on the past year and write about how I feel better than last year. I’ve noted how I feel lighter, every year, and talk about how that year must be the “year of acceptance” because of how much better I feel. But this year, year four - which whoa, I haven’t talked to/danced/laughed with my Mum in four years!? - I know for certain is acceptance. Everyone’s grief is their own, and different, but mine, I can say with certainly, has finished after four years. I know because I don’t feel bad about feeling happy, about feeling grateful to have paid off student debt and to reside where I currently do, because that wouldn’t be a reality if things turned out differently. I love my life, and even though my life for the last four years hasn’t had her in it, I still love it, and that is okay, which was once difficult to reason with.

This train of change had to happen; it was inevitable. It did attempt to derail life as I knew it, and it did deeply change me, but with retrospection, I think this was more of a detour than a derailment.