A Saddening Loss
Just over a year ago, I lost my mother to cancer, lymphoma specifically. RIP Jane Campbell, 1955-2007.
Obviously it’s taken me a while to kind of recover, and I think writing something about the process might help me some more. I’ve actually refrained from writing other blog posts because I didn’t want to let this pass without committing something to written words. I don’t aim to depress myself or others, although I’m sure a few tears will escape my eyes while writing the next several paragraphs.
She fought the cancer and endured treatment for many months before it overcame her. Nothing quite compares with the experience of picking up the phone one morning and having your sobbing father say you don’t have much time to say goodbye. She proved wrong the doctors’ estimate of 2 days, more than doubling that in the face of fatal lung failure, congested with metastasized tumors. We ended up having sufficient opportunity to say our goodbyes, talk about fond memories, settle affairs, and partly work through our grief before even completely losing her. It was a grueling several days in the ICU with no humidity, not knowing when the time might come or what to do afterwards.
I will definitely miss a number of things about my Mum, especially her strong character and caring nature. We had plenty of disagreements and fallings-out, but we never held a grudge against one another, and she was always so pleased with the accomplishments I’ve made in life: good grades, nice friends, fun & well-paying jobs, and all the other little things. She didn’t micro-manage my life but rather left me to my own devices, although there were times when I felt she and my dad made decisions for me that weren’t in my best interests – going to school out of state while moving across the country left me feeling pretty lonely, but I came out of that in the end and met some cool people along the way. She always had compelling tales from her childhood, like stealing the neighbor’s cat, riding the train to school, her brother heading off to boarding school, living in various exotic places like Singapore, and many others that presently elude my memory.
She was rather different from me, but those are probably the things that stood out the most to me. She had a really nice signature, always identical, flowing smoothly through sharp lettering and annunciated with a dominant but relaxed J. She had a knack for making friends, easily eliciting life stories from people mere minutes after meeting them; we were always on good terms with the local Chinese restaurant because she’d befriended the manager. Our cat always loved her, perhaps because she always fed him the good stuff, but he was always following her through the house or curled up by her side. She wasn’t the epitome of health (she was overweight and had high blood pressure and diabetes), but one of the things she expressed regret for was her lack of physical activity – she stopped the swimming she had enjoyed in her youth and the walking she often did around town in England – and she urged me to take better care of myself than she had of herself.
A number of my significant life experiences have been shared exclusively with my Mum. We visited England the summer I graduated from university and took a blitz tour of London in a day that gave me many good photos. I would have ended up in a jail cell had she not come to bail me out after getting arrested for running a stop sign. She visited me at Georgia Tech and we ate steak for Thanksgiving dinner in downtown Atlanta, when the holiday would otherwise have been dull and boring on the deserted campus. Living in Epsom while my dad worked in Scotland during the weekdays, she played a huge role in my early development. My brother tagged along on some of those, but my mother was obviously the dominant factor in all of them.
It’s clear to see that I’d be in a very different place without my mother’s support and guidance, and it still makes me sad that I won’t be able to further reward her with the various experiences most people eventually get to enjoy. She’ll never have the chance to babysit her grandchildren, or even to know their mother. She won’t ever enjoy a retirement in a warm, relaxing place. She won’t befriend yet another Chinese restaurant manager. She won’t visit her friends and family in England again, or travel to Italy where my brother was born. Clearly she’s not the only one missing out here – all of those things involve numerous other people who have been robbed of the possibility of knowing this lovely woman.