By Aaron Eisenhauer
When my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, her oncologist didn’t know how much time she had, but he was clear that it was limited. She spent a year in treatment, and in January 2022, she died.
I spent that intervening year clinging to a manufactured hope that she would pull through. No. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t address it. Least of all with her. We have to be positive, we have to have hope, I would say.
When she died, my walls crumbled. The world I knew was gone. My mom, the most steadfast and constant piece of it, was gone.
My grief set something in motion within me. Once I let go of the world I knew, I slowly opened to the world that is. I was on a new spiritual path (that term still makes me cringe). I learned that acceptance is freedom — and hope, when rooted in clinging, is a trap.
As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says in “When Things Fall Apart,” a book filled with hard and liberating truths, “Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.”
I try to resist regret. It’s not useful. But it breaks my heart that I didn’t know that then. I wasted so many moments where I could have been fully present and open with my mom in her final months of life. My denial was a wall I put between us.
More useful is gratitude. I am so grateful for the lessons my mother gave me, in life and in death. And I’m grateful I get to live out those lessons for the rest of my life, as long or as short as it may be.
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