I am a person who lives by a planner…like weeks out. I am not a fan of spontaneity and I can get pretty stank if I’m abruptly forced out of my routine. 2020 was a year of lessons. For me personally it was about how to manage my anxieties around change, isolation and loss. From the very beginning of the voyage into the year there were storm clouds, some scattered showers even but nothing that really knocked me off of my square….but then

IT’S RAINING:
2020’s end was the beginning of a journey that I was not at all prepared for. A few days after Thanksgiving, 8 of 10 members of my family tested positive for the Coronavirus Disease. Those eight included myself, my son and my mother. My mother and I was the sickest among us, but her sickness progressed rapidly, and intensely which led to her hospitalization.

RAGING SEAS:
December. The doctors had spoken with my sister and told her a few days before Christmas to prepare for her to come home with 24hr care and first floor living until she fully recovered which would be for a period of time undetermined. GREAT!!!!!! Just please get her home! I have lived 35 years and there has not ever been a Christmas or New Year that I spent without my mother. Christmas 2020 was a Zoom hospital visit for my mother; with my siblings, our children and our father. The purpose was to try to boost her spirits, to boost all of our spirits really. What it turned out to be though, was the opposite, for me anyway…I just wanted her home and I knew she wasn’t going to be home as soon as I had my mind made up that she would be. New Year’s Eve is a highly celebrated time in my family. We bring the year in at church EVERY year. COVID already determined that there would be no gathering in the house of the Lord, which I was prepared for…but the fact that my mother was STILL not home NINETEEN days later was just not what I wanted to deal with; and then….my sister called me. “Xan”, she said…”the doctor’s have decided to put mommie on the ventilator because she is just not breathing strongly enough to bring her levels where they need to be”. The plan was to place her on the vent for a day or two to allow her lungs to rest and the vent to breathe for her the way she needed to be breathing for herself and then remove her. I HATE the ventilator, but I was comforted in the fact that there was an actual purpose, and plan. It’s evening now, time for virtual church…at home, without mommie. Worst times of my life these weeks have been.

January. HAPPY NEW YEAR shouted everyone except me. New Year’s Day was quiet. She was responding well to the ventilator, and things were seeming hopeful . Night falls, things change…and on January 2, 2021 my mother transitioned from her earthly life and entered into the gates of Heaven.

THIS SHIP IS WRECKED

How do you journey through raging seas when the light in the lighthouse goes out?

I’m home, during a pandemic that prevents me any real escape. Home in a place that I shared with my mother everyday. The house that was once was full of sound, full of her thinking out loud, full of her words of wisdom, full of her laughter, full of her fussing, full of her love and full of her just being here….she left home everyday to take care of my grandmother, so the house was full of what she smelled like…or what she was cooking…this house is LACKING. I don’t even watch tv anymore because the things I would watch are things that we would watch together.

I had gotten to the point where I didn’t need anyone to be in the house with me or the need to be at anyone else’s. The days went on and then today…her birthday. We had plans for today. Instead, the plan is to have our kids open their last gifts from their Nana, to sing happy birthday to an empty chair and continue to carry on…but HOW? Somebody PLEASE tell me how I am supposed to get through this?!?! I have felt pain before. I have been broken before. I have felt like there is no way out of the tunnel that I found myself in…the difference between then and now, my mother was there to help me through.

My mother was an advocate; a mighty voice for those who had been robbed of their own, and for those who had yet to find theirs. She was a worshipper of God, in ALL things in her life; the good, the bad, the successes and failures, the disappointments, the heartaches. Even in her sickness, she worshipped God. She was an educator. She taught so many, she empowered so many, she impacted so many. She was a MOTHER not just to the children she birthed, but to children who needed more than what they were able to get from their own. In her mothering she prepared me for so much life, she paved ways and left footprints for me to follow as I journeyed through womanhood and even more; motherhood. She motivated me. She pressed me until I saw myself the same way that she saw me. There was one thing that she didn’t do though…she didn’t prepare me for her to not be here. I don’t know how to not have her here. I don’t know where to go for the things I would have asked her to help me with. She was a mountain of a woman. She was the most nurturing of mothers, even in the adulthood of her three children. She was a monument; she was my lighthouse.

grief: /ɡrēf/ noun

1. deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death:
Ex: “she was overcome with grief”

I AM she. She IS me!!!

My educational background has provided me with an understanding of grief in a manner to help others through it; to identify even for myself the different stages and try to manage them as they occur. I have an understanding of how difficult the “Year of Firsts” is expected to be, and I am prepared to help others through it. What I have found, though, is that there is no real way to deal. I am a feeler; an empath. I am fully aware of what I feel most times and how to manage it (thanks mommie); but now? Now??? I feel everything all at once and it is rendering me incapable of justly expressing the emptiness that I feel. I remember when I was in elementary school, we were learning about secondary colors and how more than one color was needed to make any specific colors. A classmate asked if white was a color…no, was the answer. Another classmate said, no, black is not a color….but that is incorrect. White is the absence of color while black is the combination of all the colors….I am currently a black crayon of emotion. I am wandering, alone, overwhelmed, quivering and completely LOST in the caves of this deserted island of grief and the light is a far off.

I have been able to find fleeting moments of peace when people who she impacted talk to me about her, but when the conversations with them are over and I am left alone and broken, it is almost impossible to maintain my sanity in the unavoidable chasms of murderous silence in my own house.

She gifted me. She gifted me with so very much of herself; the absolute very best that she had to give, and in all of my getting, I was sure to get faith. I am a believer in Christ and I know that He will provide comfort to me. I ask that you pray for me as I journey through and try to hear God clearly in the days to come.

Happy Heavenly Birthday to the very best person I have ever known.

Dr. Doris Christine Carpenter
1/28/1954-1/2/2021