Perspective Is Not Always a Choice

This is my mother during her senior year of high school.

She died on October 1, 2018, the same year I lost my husband.

I have always loved my mother immensely. But loving someone does not mean agreeing with everything they did, every decision they made, or every way they chose to survive.

My mother did things I didn’t always understand. She handled things in ways I might not have handled them myself. And since she died, reconciling the woman I loved with some of the choices I struggled to understand has been one of the quieter pieces of my grief.

Until recently.

Because recently, I’ve started seeing her through a different lens.

And if I had to reduce the lesson of my mother’s life to one word, it would be unbreakable.

Her life was challenging through certain moments. She experienced things that were difficult to accept, then somehow found herself having to accept something else, and then something else. At times, it seemed as though life kept putting another test in front of her before she had finished recovering from the one before it.

But she kept going.

Giving up simply wasn’t something my mother seemed to know how to do.

She could find a tether to this world no matter what life put in front of her. She found something to care about. Something to do. Something to value. Something that made her feel useful, relevant, needed, or simply alive.

There is a strength in that I didn’t fully appreciate when she was here.

Because continuing forward when you actually want to move forward is one thing.

Continuing forward when every part of you would rather disappear underneath a rock, or in our true Cancer fashion crawl inside your shell and stay there, is something entirely different. 🦀

My mother kept moving.

Not perfectly.

Not always in ways I understood.

But she moved.

She protected.

She survived.

And maybe perspective isn’t always something we deliberately choose. Sometimes enough time passes, enough life happens to us, and suddenly we are standing somewhere we have never stood before.

From there, the view changes.

I can see my mother differently now because I understand things I could not understand then.

And somewhere along the way, my grief for losing her began making room for something else.

Honor.

Respect.

And a profound admiration for the woman she was.

I loved my mother then.

But I understand her so much more now.

❤️‍🩹