It is Mother's Day today and it bothers me.
Last Friday I heard someone refer to it and it bothered me more than I thought. I never looked forward to Mother's Day in the past, but now that my mother is not there anymore, I do miss it.
So Mother's Day needs to transform into something different now - a celebration of my mother for what she was, for what good she did, for the wonderful times we have been sharing.
This year it's still too early, though, for the images of eight months of suffering and her untimely death are still blocking my memories of all those years before that.
This year, we bought an Acer that we are going to plant on her grave. Hopefully next year is going to bring back the positive memories from the past so that Mother's Day can become a day of celebration again.

 

Last week, I went to a friend of mine who is a colleague-therapist and specializes in the EMDR procedure. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) basically consists of stimulating as much of the brain as possible through eye movements or, in my case, ticking sounds that alternate between the left and the right ear. The effect of the procedure is that the brain functions are enhanced, so that a therapeutic goals becomes easier to reach.

That goal was in my case the issues I am having with my mother's death last December. You may have read about it in previous blog entries. I basically found that the last image I have of her alive, just before she died, was blocking all my other memories of her.

So I agreed with my friend to do an EMDR session to see what we could do about that.

And then began in incredible journey. Based on my feelings about that last image, a string of associations started to unfold before me, ranging from anger about her death, feelings about our mother-child relationship in the past, my fear of getting cancer as well, images of me actually dying in the same way and having to leave behind my loved ones, etc. This all gradually became lighter, though, as though things were getting resolved. Images became more positive - at some point I was sitting with a radiant white sheep in my lap, just after having had feelings of true formlessness and preceding feelings of being levitated by the love between myself and my mother and between other people and me. In the end, the image that we started out with became more positive, with my mother smiling about being relieved from her suffering. It was at that point that I could finally start accepting her death and the fact that this relieve was liberation for her and that, as far as she was concerned, life after death would be infinitely more positive than her life before death.

So what did this result in for me? In the first place, I made a start accepting my mother's death as something positive as well, not only as a loss, but more as liberation for her. I realise that the love between me and her will never end and that it is love that unites people and supports everyone who needs it. My feelings got milder, less regretful. My love for other people, such as my partner, has gotten stronger and more allowing. In general, the sun has started shining again, without my having illusions that my mourning is done - that will continue for a long time. I do believe, though, that a major step has been taken to have a look at a more positive side of what happened back in December.

Thank you Barbara for making this happen!