Derek Thompson, who recently lost his mother to a 16-month battle with pancreatic cancer, reflects on the emotional toll of watching her die:
We never spoke of the food she couldn’t eat, the thick hair she couldn’t grow back, or the weight she couldn’t keep. Instead, riding home from New York once a month and bounding onto her bed, I’d serve a feast of happy stories harvested from a life spent trying not to worry. I cried often, but privately, in the stairway at work, on the train behind a pair of sunglasses, and in my apartment, indulging a memory behind a locked door. But I only lost it twice in front of her, both times trying to say the same thing: What makes me saddest isn’t imagining all the things I’ll miss, but imagining all the things you’ll miss. The wedding dances, the wine-fueled parties, her birthday cards, each emblazoned with ludicrously incorrect ages. For Mom, who drew kinetic energy from every drip of living, as if by photosynthesis, and braved the winter of life with spring in her heart, smiling like a sweet little maniac all the way to the end, cancer was such cosmic robbery.
Two weeks ago, transcribing [grief researcher George Bonanno’s] interview in a coffee shop in New York, I was typing this passage:
“In the Asian cultures, the idea is that the person isn’t really gone. You honor them. You appease them. You can still make them happy, elsewhere.”
Tears burned in the gutters as I reread those words. “You can still make them happy.” It would be so nice to think so. But for those of us who cannot believe in God and afterlives, this is just one of the things you lose forever when you lose a person: the ability to make them happy.
The Dish 