You have an idea of how your life should go. What you want to be when you grow up, what you want your family life to look like, how you want to enjoy your life. Sometimes your plan changes, you find other interests, and you change course. Sometimes things turn out exactly like you thought they would. You make goals and strive to reach them. But sometimes, items are thrown in your path, things that were never expected, planned for, wanted, or even imagined. Things that change everything in such a way that your world is flipped upside down, and you don’t even know how to move forward.
what i thought life would be like
I always thought I would be able to call my mom as an adult. When I looked to the future, there was no doubt in my mind that my mom would always be there. I figured she would watch my kids grow up and be there for big moments like graduating high school or getting married. I’d be able to call and tell her funny stories about my family, ask for advice on whether I should keep working or stay home or do something entirely out of left field, or even just listen to her talk about how my kids are exactly like me, and it was payback. It wasn’t necessarily that I dreamed of this future. I just never imagined it would be taken away from me.
And to be clear, I did not expect that she would live forever. That would be crazy and unrealistic. But what I didn’t anticipate I would only get 26 years with her. She would always joke with us about how she would live a very long time because she had children so late in life. That we kept her young. I mean, my grandma lived to be 100 and had her last child at 38, while my mom was 42, almost 43 when she had my younger brother. Her death was something I knew was inevitable, but something I wouldn’t have to cope with until I was in my 50s or even hopefully 60s, not in my 20s.
what really happened
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, the life that I thought was certain was starting to fade. I was 23, living in Austin with my husband, Hudson, and we didn’t have any children. Hudson was still in school, finishing up his associate’s degree, and I was getting settled in my job. I had barely grown up at this point, and I still relied on my mom for many things. She was my best friend and the person I depended on most in the world, aside from my husband. She was one of the few people I felt I had seen me for me, not just the person I put on so others wouldn’t worry, and she loved me anyway.
We moved back up to Dallas because I could not bear to be apart from her while she went through this. It worked out flawlessly. Hudson was moving on to his bachelor’s degree and attending a school in Dallas, and I was able to find a relatively close job. We started going to the church I had attended when I was a child. We didn’t have much luck finding a church we liked in Austin, and instead of searching and exhausting ourselves meeting new people, we figured this would be the best place for us, plus it would give us more time to spend with my parents. We started getting involved right away, helping out with the children’s ministries, something we had wanted to do for a while.
Every Sunday, though, as I sat in church, it was impossible to hold back tears. I felt ridiculous crying in church, but if I can’t cry there, where else is safe? I was grieving my future, my family’s future, my mom’s life, and she wasn’t even gone yet. I should have just been happy she was still here, right? Just stop being sad and enjoy the time I did have to spend with her, and be thankful you could even move back home. But questions about the future kept gnawing at me, like an itch you can’t scratch or a headache that just will not go away. Would my mom meet my children? Would I even be able to have children? Who would I go to for parenting advice? What am I supposed to do without her? I can’t do this without her. It was a constant flurry of worry as I imagined this new future that God had in store for us, not one I was particularly looking forward to.
where do we go from here?
My expectations and my reality were on opposite ends of the spectrum. And that happens so often in life. We expect our lives to be a certain way, and when it doesn’t turn out as we planned, we grieve the life that will never be. This is the plight of humanity. We have fallen in sin, and we will never have the life that God intended us to have. We can never be in perfect unity with Him as long as we are on this Earth, and unfortunately, that not only affects us but everyone we love. And God grieves with us. He meets us in this grief because He knows this is not how it should be.
This was my mom’s favorite verse and one that was very much on my heart during this period.
Proverbs 3:5-6
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
While I was grieving for the future, all I could do was trust in the Lord and lean on Him. It was okay to grieve the life that wasn’t going to happen, but I still needed to recognize that God was in control and this was all according to His perfect plan for the redemption of His people. I will never know why my mom got cancer, how she got cancer, why it wasn’t an earlier stage instead of the one that had a 22% survival rate. But I do know that through all the uncertainty, the questions, the fears, the anxiety, that the Lord was there.
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What are you grieving today? Is it a loss you’ve already experienced or is it anticipatory grief? I’d love to hear from you about your experience. comment below or send me an message at my contact me page.
