Mourning walk

Two weeks after I started to seek help, I was suddenly called by the organisation for cancer patients and their families/friends. Join the "mourning walk" in the morning, I was told.

So I did. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the group was lovely, even though it was made up of men and women perhaps twice my age, or more. But this is grief: personal, ageless, and common to us all. Though rituals and ways of remembering our loved ones may differ, the pain, attachment and sense of loss is what makes us feel, and makes us, human.

We walked around Mont Royal, and various members of the group came to me, put their arms around me. A lady, who lost her husband a year ago, looked at me intensely, and spoke to me in the softest and most compassionate tone. "It must be so difficult for you at this age..." Her look melted my heart, melted the smile I put on so bravely everyday because people expect you to smile and to be "normal" again after just a few months. She gave me a motherly look, a look which says: "I know what you're going through... Don't be afraid..."

A man lost his father and mother within two weeks of one another. Two, three years later, he still says: "It takes time... It takes time..."

A newcomer to the group like me, a lady perhaps the same age as my mum, broke down almost as soon as she began to recount the memories of her dear, brave and inspiring mother. A tall man, perhaps nearing his sixties and who had the build of a big, sturdy football player (in fact he revealed he did play football at university...) said he lost his mother a year ago. He gave up a relationship and the better part of the last three decades to move in with his mother, to he with her, to take care of her... to be there with her at that final moment to offer her his arms that night when she left this world. "People don't understand. They don't know why I still cry. They don't know what it's like to lose a parent..."

Sure, everyone will lose their parents one day, if they have not lost them already. And some don't have the "privilege" of ever having parents. But with the privilege of having had them comes the pain of loss, pain of hearing their voice, smelling their scent, and reliving sweet memories long ago even though their bodies have already turned to ash.

Where does the pain come from? For where else are you going to find unconditional love? Who else can scold you and be so angry at you one moment and then just forget it all? "You can have one partner, ten partners", he joked "but you only have one mother..." The mother who nurtured us, the same mother who nursed us when we were ill or emotionally hurting, the mother who changed our diapers and bathed us, who massaged us and tucked us in at night.

Isn't it bizarre how at the end of it all, the mother becomes child, and child assumes the role of a parent? It was a common theme we realised




A leave fell slowly and drifted aimlessly in the slight breeze. Falling leaves return to their roots, and fallen souls return to the Earth to