Perspective: How my mother prepared us to live without her
By Anna Nordberg May 23 at 8:30 AM The night my mother told me that her cancer was terminal, she came into my room to say good night, same as she always did. “I’m so sorry I’m not going to be at your wedding, Anna,” she said. Lying there in the dark, 14 years old, this seemed like the least of our worries, and her words surprised me. She saw a string of events — graduations, careers, births — that would happen without her; all I saw was a fathomless blank. But those words were a remarkable gift.
Did my mother plan strategically? Did she try to cram a lifetime of parenting into the three to four years her doctors gave her? I don’t know, but I think probably not. Her main desire was to keep things as normal as possible, and for the most part, she did that in those years before she died, when I was 17. My brother and I went to school, my dad went to his office, and even when my mother was too sick to keep working, she still did the permission slips and organized the family trips.
“Consider your stewardship of fun and imagination and interest as important as your stewardship of their performance in school or their behaviors,” Mogel says. “Follow them, let them lead.” Nature, she explains, is an excellent co-parent. Even a scramble over rocks down to a creek bed is an excellent way for kids to navigate a challenge.
She and my dad also modeled the kind of low-key, everyday courage it takes to be in pain and keep moving forward. When it came to processing as a family, we didn’t always get it right — we had no bucket list and no language for grief, and we paid a price for that once she was gone. But I saw both my parents acknowledge that something was hard and move forward, and it is one of the things I’ve remained most grateful for, especially when my own pregnancy went off the rails.
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