The sad truth is that we all will lose someone close to us in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, this happens to many when they are young and ill prepared. What is one of the most difficult things to go through is having to care for ill parents after they\u2019ve taken care of us for so many years. How can we bear to have to see our role models on that downward spiral into poor health? <\/p>\n
Diane Smith is a 51-year-old Maine resident who is a mother of two children. Her mother Mabel was diagnosed with breast cancer when Diane was 5 years old. It had already moved into her bones. Her diagnosis was terminal. She was divorced and had three children under her care. Diane was the youngest, Robert was 10 and Theresa was 15. Diane\u2019s mother\u2019s depression and pain set in, leading to a mixture of medication that made her act unlike herself. \u201cMy mom lived a long time with it. My sister ended up raising me a lot of the time when I was younger,\u201d Diane said. Diane and her brother Rob never connected as closely as she and her sister did. \u201cMe and my sister are so close because we went through a lot of hardships together,\u201d Diane said.<\/p>\n
Theresa was 15 when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She moved out at 18, when Diane was 8 years old.\u00a0 \u201cI only remember a short time where me and my sister lived under the same roof,\u201d Diane said. For most of the time when Diane was growing up, her sister lived in a house just next door. She was also raising a family and trying to get her footing in the adult world. \u201cMy sister lived right next door. She helped out a lot. When she would cook dinner for her family, she would always bring me and my mom over some,\u201d Diane said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mom was very bitter because of her diagnosis. She lived a long time after she was diagnosed with cancer. She lived 10 years,\u201d Diane said. Because of the situation, Diane\u2019s family didn\u2019t have a lot of money coming in and times were tough. Diane\u2019s social life was also heavily affected. \u00a0\u201cI couldn\u2019t go out with my friends. I had to stay home and take care of her a lot of the time. It wasn\u2019t her fault, but it made me kind of resentful. We were a lot alike and we both butted heads a lot,\u201d Diane said.<\/p>\n
While Theresa was helping out as much as possible, there wasn\u2019t anyone else who stepped forward. In fact, a lot of people didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 \u201cNobody knew about my mom. I never told anybody,\u201d Diane said. There were a lot of factors as to why she never let anyone in to discuss her family\u2019s struggle. Because of her situation, she hadn\u2019t made any close friends in school. Children picked up on this and she was heavily bullied.\u00a0 \u201cMy dad lived, for a very short time, next door, but for the most part he lived in Connecticut. He did what he could. He\u2019d send me money and I\u2019d go see him in the summertime,\u201d Diane said. Her father was one of her only resources and close relatives as a child.<\/p>\n
\u201cI missed a lot of school. A lot of it was that she was lonely,\u201d Diane explained. Her mother would keep her home to keep her company during the day because she didn\u2019t want to be alone. Missing so much class time worsened Diane\u2019s social life and affected her grades greatly. \u201cI was a teenager and wasn\u2019t the easiest child at all,\u201d Diane admitted. Although she did everything she could to care for her mother, their relationship was strained. Despite many hard memories to look back on, Diane recalls her childhood Christmases and cherishes the joy they would bring her mother.\u00a0 \u201cI had good memories of Christmas. She really tried to be a mom at Christmas,\u201d Diane said. With her health worsening over the years, no matter how tired she was, the Christmas decorations would go up and Diane\u2019s mother\u2019s spirits would lift.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe died when I was in eighth grade. I flunked every class,\u201d Diane said. After her mother passed away on Valentine\u2019s Day at age 55, Diane moved in with Theresa and her family. Theresa made Diane go to school every day so she could see her succeed. \u201cAt my eighth grade graduation, I got two awards: most academic improvement and greatest phys. ed. improvement,\u201d Diane smiled.<\/p>\n
As to be expected, life changed drastically for Diane after the death of her mother. \u201cI always wondered what my life would have been like if I had a mom who had never gotten sick and could spend time with me,\u201d she confesses. Grief treats everyone differently and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Diane didn\u2019t cry at her mother\u2019s funeral, though distraught.\u00a0 \u201cNo matter how much you don\u2019t get along with her, she\u2019s still your mom,\u201d she said. Her mother would not only jump into action during Christmas, but every time Diane got sick, she would sympathize. She would take care of her instead of the other way around. Diane caught a horrible cold after her mother\u2019s funeral and when she found herself sick on the couch without her mother, she cried for the first time after her death.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019m a decent person because of what I went through,\u201d Diane said. Her relationship with her mother while she was alive had turned Diane into someone she didn\u2019t want to be. \u201cI said some bad things to her the morning she died that I regret. I was bound and determined to be a good person and not the person I was when she was alive,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
Diane acted out a lot because of the heavy weight on her shoulders at such a young age. Her mother used to tell her that one day she\u2019d have a daughter and then she\u2019d know what it was like. Diane says she got lucky in those regards because both of her children are much better than she was growing up. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a role model to teach me how to be a mom\u00a0 When you have children you have to put them first, you can\u2019t be selfish.\u00a0 I always wanted to be the kind of mom I wanted but never had,\u201d she said. \u201cI turned my life around for the better.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The sad truth is that we all will lose someone close to us in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, this happens to many when they are young and ill prepared. What is one of the most difficult things to go through is having to care for ill parents after they\u2019ve taken care of us for so many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8539,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708\/revisions\/8539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}