I stood outside my mother’s house, the hot sun burning my scalp, waiting as the police walked through to determine if her death was suspicious or natural. Shock kept me docile and calm, a sense of unreality as I watched the coroner remove her body on a gurney. I was 41 years old, my mother 65 when she passed, suddenly and shockingly.
It was only later that night that it all came crashing on me. My husband held me tightly as I cried, deep groans of anguish tearing my throat as I screamed, “It’s not fair, it’s not fair.” I’d regressed to a toddler who couldn’t make sense of the world.
That first week I couldn’t sleep, relying on the sleeping pills I’d found in my mother’s house. The same ones that she used to take after my stepfather’s suicide 11 months before. They provided a few hours of tormented dreams in which I searched for my mother, hearing her voice in another room, only to find it empty when I entered. When I woke up, reality crashed over me once again. She was dead, I was truly an orphan.
I’d regressed to a toddler who couldn’t make sense of the world
Weeks passed, a hushed air descended. My life had been frenetic while she was in the world. I had always been her carer, but in the past few years I had slowly taken on more and more duties as my stepfather’s health also declined. Taking her for a weekly outing, managing her calendar of appointments with various specialists, as well as driving and attending them with her: the psychiatrist for her bipolar, nephrologist for her kidneys, endocrinologist for her diabetes, orthopaedic surgeon for her arthritis-damaged knee, GP for the day-to-day ailments.
After my stepfather’s death the duties extended further: managing payment of her bills, grocery shopping, her NDIS funding. As her needs filled the cracks of my life, and then bulldozed it, my own family suffered. My husband and daughter were neglected and relegated to second tier. I was a woman torn apart by obligation and stress.
After her passing, there was an emptiness. Where before I was constantly on call, feeling a sense of urgency to manage the unending tasks of her care, now – there was nothing. Nothing but time: to think, to grieve, to feel the gaping emptiness that she had taken up.
Now I was an adult in the wild, untethered by obligations
I spent months in bed, grief washing over me in dead black waves. With my mother’s death I lost so much more than a parent: she was my history, my connection to my culture, my sense of belonging to an extended family. Now I was an adult in the wild, untethered by obligations and my own inclination to put other people’s needs before my own.
A year after her passing, the grief slowly lifted; dissipated so it was like a fog where I could see the outline of the life I wanted to lead. I could remake my world into what I wanted, putting my own needs first. No longer was I on call, tied to obligations that I resented. I examined my life forensically: Who were the people that lifted me up? Who were the ones that drained me? No longer would I settle for tenuous connections that took more than they gave.
Snip. I cut off the acquaintances and fair-weather friends who caused more angst than joy. I now had more time and energy for the friends who had weathered the highs and lows for decades with me. They were the people I wanted to put my time and energy into.
Without my mother exhorting my call to duty any longer, the family members who were once a cause of tension now had no place in my life. A calmness descended as I didn’t have to ride the train of conflict, with frequent pit stops into rage and angst. Without the constant turmoil, I felt my shoulders relax. This is what it was to live without chaos and overwrought emotion.
I am finally in the position of retiring my role as primary carer. While I will always be a parent and have responsibilities tied to that, there is such a freedom in parenting an adolescent who is making her own forays into independence, and thus allowing me more freedom, too.
The grief is still always here, but it has moved, retracted and made itself smaller, leaving space for something more. For me to be something more. Every day as I achieve my ambitions, I am able to dream bigger. It is a gift to live. It is an even greater gift to live life fully for yourself.
Amra Pajalic is the owner and publisher of , an independent press dedicated to the publication of own voices fiction and nonfiction, as well as genre fiction.
