Grief - Denial

I know that throughout the journey with my mom's cancer I am going to grieve many things. Death is not the only thing people grieve. We grieve anything that is lost. I will grieve the loss of "function," or realizing my mom isn't as healthy as we thought she was, that she will not always be here with us. I went through this when my dad had his heart attack 2 years ago, as well. I will grieve the loss of day to day things, like when she's sick from treatment and we can't just pick up and go to lunch or visit on end about random things. I will grieve a lot of things, I'm sure, prayerfully and hopefully not the end of her life here on earth; that's something I'm completely unprepared for. Grief sucks. There's no other way to put it. It's awful, especially in the magnitude of something like cancer. I've been down the ol' grief road several times in my adult life, and each time I think to myself that at that very moment it is awful being an adult. It's something that makes you want to crawl up on your mom's lap and cry and just be held, you know? It's strange, it's like I know what to prepare for: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You can go through them one at a time or several at a time and not always in that order...that's the textbook stuff. And yet, every time you go through the grieving process it's different. It cuts you in a new way. It changes you, and if you let God, He'll change and strengthen your faith through it. He'll let you climb onto His lap and cry.

That being said, there is one part of grief that isn't so bad, and that's denial, and I've got it bad. I am SO in denial about my mom's cancer. I can sit at breakfast with my family and go shopping with my mom and hardly think about it. Someone can ask about her treatment options, and she can make a joke about not pushing the shopping cart because she's the sick one, and I swear to you - it's as if they're talking about someone else. I can't describe it. It just doesn't phase me in the way that it "should" phase me because it's my mom. I am in complete denial. Denial. Not "nice" but definitely takes the jagged edge off of depression and anger, doesn't it? And when I leave Zooey's room from her dreamfeed (still not dropped, but that's a whole other story...) and get ready to turn in for the night, the depression and/or anger hit me like a ton of bricks. Do I let myself feel it? No. I shut it off and go to sleep. I know it'll come...I've done this gig before. Right now I'm just letting my subconscious do the thinking and trying my best to enjoy everything else. I'm also praying my heart out that the lymph node biopsy and brain MRI both come back negative.