As the clock ticks closer and closer to graduation day, I reflect back on my senior year. I think back to my parents moving me into my last college dorm, and talking to my friends about how excited we were to embark on our last year together, despite how bittersweet it was. With living in New Jersey and going to school in New York City, I went home a lot my first three years, and I made a pact with myself to not go home as often this year to soak up all the time I had left at school. I stayed true to that pact up until November, when my mom called me as I was getting ready for work, telling me that she was in the hospital. Neither one of us knew at the time of that phone call that from that hospital, she would go to two different rehab facilities, never to come home again, and that the rest of my senior year would not go as I planned.
The day after Christmas, my family got the news that no family ever wants to receive, especially around the holidays. My mom, who was diagnosed with lung cancer back in 2021, was told by her oncologist that treatment was no longer an option, and he believed that she should go into hospice. There was no doubt that after getting that news, I made sure that I came home every weekend that I could have. I didn’t even want to return back to school. I wanted to take the semester off, but my mom insisted on me finishing so she could watch me walk in May, even if she couldn’t physically be at my graduation. So, instead of going out with my friends on the weekend or exploring the city, I spent my weekends traveling on New Jersey Transit buses, visiting my mom at her rehab facility, having ice cream dates, and playing Uno, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.Â
Three weekends ago, I had other obligations at school and I couldn’t come home. But I felt okay about it because my mom and I planned on having a dinner date where I brought Applebee’s to her the following weekend. That was until the morning of Friday, April 4, and just like that morning back in November, I was getting ready to leave for student teaching when I got a phone call. It seems like I always get the phone calls that I don’t want to get early in the morning. Except this time, the phone call wasn’t from my mom— it was about my mom. My mom had passed away during the night, the day before I was supposed to come home and see her. No matter how many people tell me that I couldn’t have known, and that I came home as much as I could to see my mom, there will always be a piece of me that will never forgive myself for not coming home that weekend. If I could have a time machine that could have shown me that my mom wouldn’t have made it to the next weekend, I would have dropped everything to have been there for one last visit, one last selfie, one last game of Uno, one last hug.Â
Instead of going into student teaching that day, I stood outside my dorm building making phone calls that I didn’t think I would have to make, and getting tissues from the security guards in the building lobby who could see me crying through the doors. I had to try to type out emails to my professors telling them I was going home for two weeks even though my vision was blurry from all the tears. Professors always tell you about email etiquette, but they don’t tell you how to formally say, “My mom died,” in an email when you can’t even accept it yourself. I mean, how could I? I was just talking to her on the phone before I went to bed the night before, and then, when I woke up, she was gone.Â
I spent the next week not at student teaching or attending my classes, but at the funeral home and the church, making the funeral arrangements with my sister and my grandparents. Instead of typing up the lesson plan I was supposed to teach that week, I was typing up my mom’s eulogy that my sister and I were going to deliver at my mom’s service. Instead of celebrating my birthday weekend with my friends at school like I had planned, I spent the day before my birthday watching my mom get put into the ground, and then went back home to take a quiz that was due at 11:59 p.m.
Most college students my age are dealing with applying for jobs and the stress that comes with the post-grad life that we will be living in shortly. I never would have thought that I would be dealing with that on top of grieving my mom. People tend to say, “Grief is just love with no place to go,” and while I believe that, I also have learned that grief is a lot of other things. It’s a random wave of realization that I’ll never get to be in our happy place, Wildwood, New Jersey, with my mom again, or just get to drive with her in the car. It’s remembering that I’ll never get to send her pictures of my dinner, or call her when something exciting happens to me. Grief is watching Abbott Elementary with an empty hole in my chest where watching it with her, or texting her about it while I’m at school, used to be. It’s the guilt of having that pact to not come home as much, realizing I missed spending time with my mom when she was actually home and we could still do things together, before she couldn’t walk and our visits were at a rehab facility. It’s all the things we’ll never get to do together, the things that she’ll never get to see me do, the Facetime calls we’ll never get to have anymore, and the goodbye that I didn’t get to say.Â
But as much as grief sucks, believe it or not, there have been some motivators to it. My mom wrote my sister and I letters for us to read after she was gone, and, as hard as it was to read, my mom wrote in my letter, “You are going to make such an awesome teacher.” Since I read that letter, it motivated me to work on job applications to be the awesome teacher that my mom can watch over proudly. Everyone always talked about my mom and how she was always smiling and optimistic, motivating me to smile everyday like my mom and remain positive, even when life feels anything but that right now. And most importantly, I kept up with my schoolwork during my leave because I know my mom wanted more than anything to be here for my graduation day, and now that she’ll have the best seat in the house, I need to walk across that stage for her.Â
As I’m writing this article, it’s exactly one month until graduation. I am excited that I’ve finally almost made it, but I’m also hurting that my mom won’t be there to celebrate with me. I return back to school from my leave in two days, and I’m looking forward to what’s in store for the last few weeks of my senior year, but I’m heartbroken that I won’t get to tell my mom about it or send her pictures of it. I’ve learned that there are a lot of different emotions that you have to figure out how to deal with as you navigate through grief, and it’s just the cherry on top of the sundae of things I have to learn how to navigate once I graduate. I did not picture as my dad was driving us into the city in September that my senior year would take the turn that it did, but it has taught me more than anything I could’ve learned in a lecture hall.
There’s a quote from Winnie the Pooh that says, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” My mom was my best friend in the whole entire world, which made saying goodbye to her so hard. But like Winnie the Pooh said, how lucky am I to have had the best mom in the whole world that I will spend the rest of my life missing. Everything I do from now on is for her, starting with walking across that stage in May.Â
And the last thing I’ll say is, hug your loved ones. Call them. Make plans to see them. Life proves itself to be unpredictable every day, and you never know when that last hug, phone call, or visit may be.