Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock

Author:Satya Doyle Byock [Byock, Satya Doyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Going It Alone

“We’d had a really nice visit a few months before she died.” Mira’s voice was steady but strained. “It was just after she’d received the diagnosis. I flew straight back home and started accompanying my parents to my mom’s doctor appointments.”

“So it was a really sudden diagnosis?” I asked.

Mira nodded.

I was still learning the details of how her mother had passed away about five years before.

“Yes, very. She was fifty-four when she died. It happened so—” Mira looked away. “It happened so, so fast.”

Mira looked absentmindedly out the windows at the buildings and sky. Memories were starting to come back to her viscerally.

“I was the first one to really understand that she was going to die, I think. The doctor said something about treatment options, but I know what ‘stage four’ means. They can give you options, but once it’s in the liver like that…” She trailed off.

Mira looked down and her face began to flush with emotion. She grabbed a tissue and just held it, crumpled in her hand, thinking.

“She never had a thought for herself,” she continued, looking down into her lap. “I think we all realized that she’d been having digestive issues for months, and that she didn’t talk about it. She never told us. She just adjusted her diet in ways that she thought would help.”

I was getting a sense of her mother’s extreme fortitude and self-sufficiency, for better or worse.

“Honestly, I’m not sure it would have made a difference if she’d told us,” Mira continued. “The cancer was probably too far gone anyway, but it does make me angry to even consider it, thinking about what could have happened if she had sought help, or if my father had insisted that she see a doctor.”

In her early thirties, Mira was, I realized, partially in therapy and starting to “do her work” psychologically because the loss of her mother had changed everything for her. Grief often forces a kind of life review. It’s an experience that no one wants, but it’s also an emotion that tends to put everything into perspective. Unlike Conner, Mira’s life as a Stability Type hadn’t collapsed; she’d been able to maintain momentum, but the impact of that loss had been lingering in the background for the past five years.

“You never sought support for grief after your mother passed away?” I asked Mira.

She shook her head.

“I think I was just in ‘go mode’ for so long, handling the logistics of my mother’s memorial, and then supporting my father through his grief and all the help he needed now that my mother was gone. My brother too. He started to spin out. I had to try to keep him on track.”

“It must have been a lot.”

“It was crazy. I think those first two years were a blur. I was still working most of that time too. There were times when the grief was so bad that I’d have to call in sick,” Mira shared. “But for the most part, I’d just cry in the shower after work.

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