By Gretchen Sonnenberg

It has been two and a half years since my mom died and it still catches me off guard. Memories resurface at the smallest trigger—a fleeting scent of perfume off a stranger in a department store, her winter coat left in the back of the closet, a grocery list in her handwriting buried at the bottom of a desk drawer.

Everyone outside my family expects me to have moved on by now. “Get on with your life. It’s what your mom would have wanted,” I’ve been told countless times. But how do I get on with my life when I don’t recognize it anymore? Everything I’ve known for the past 23 years has been turned upside down, flipped sideways, and tossed around.

When a building that has stood in the middle of town for years is torn down, it leaves a shocking gap at first. Then, gradually, you start forgetting what color the building was, and eventually that empty space seems natural.

It’s not like that when someone dies. The hole remains, but you never forget.
I was 19 and home for the summer after my first year of college when my mom, Denise, a teddy bear designer and maker, was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Little kids get leukemia—not 45-year-old women. Not my mom.

That summer is a blur of doctors’ appointments, hospital stays, blood tests, and medical jargon that quickly became part of my vernacular.

I was angry that summer. I was going through something none of my friends could understand. I didn’t understand it myself. My days were filled with feeding my mom ice chips, walking her to the bathroom, trying to find food she could keep down, and wiping her forehead with a cool washcloth after violent episodes of vomiting.

She went into remission the day I moved back to the University of Kentucky for my sophomore year, and I thought everything was going to go back to normal. Months went by and she gradually improved. I came home every other weekend to Tipp City, Ohio. Sometimes it was to Miami Valley Hospital to visit her in the oncology ward, where you had to wear a face mask if you had even the slightest cold and where the rooms never seemed to get warm. And sometimes my visits led me home—the home my mom designed herself and my dad built.

I muddled through my classes, but I was marked by something invisible. My friends politely ignored what I was going through. It was too close for them—too hard and too frightening.

The school year ended and once again I came home hoping for a “normal” summer. I thought my mom was finally better.

We spent a week at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, in May, my family’s vacation spot. Life was good. My mom’s fresh crop of brown hair threaded with silver was long enough to be teased into spikes, and the sun brought color back to her cheeks.

Then the color slowly started fading. My mom fell out of remission in July. A bone marrow transplant wasn’t an option, and there weren’t many options left. If she rejected another round of chemotherapy, she’d live only weeks. And if chemotherapy worked, she’d have a few months.

During her last months my anger turned into anguish and I grew up swiftly. Time became our family’s first priority.

I didn’t go back to school that fall. The day classes started I sat on my mom’s bed and cried. She offered to call the university and convince them to let me start late. She didn’t realize that I was crying not because I was missing a semester, but because I realized what missing it meant: She was dying. She gave it everything she had left and lived until the middle of November 2001.

I felt guilty about a lot of things—every fight I ever had with my mom, every mean word I ever said, every time I forgot to say “thank you,” every time I went out with my friends instead of my parents, and every time I didn’t take 10 minutes to call home. I didn’t know how to make up for lost time or how to make things in the past better.

I wanted to read books about what I was going through, or go to a support group for people my age in the same situation. I was willing to grasp onto anything that would tell me I was normal and that it would get better eventually. But I couldn’t find anything. Everything was directed at people older or younger than me. I did find one book, though, that was helpful called Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman, which tells stories of various women who lost their moms at different stages in their lives.

I now volunteer with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society but still find a lack of resources for people ages 18-24 who have a parent with cancer. I’ve found that this isn’t unusual. I actually joined an online support group for people who lost a parent to cancer, but eventually quit when I realized that most of the members were much older than myself.

I eventually stopped looking for resources and turned to my family.

My mom is gone, and I am left with a gaping hole. I am left with my memories. I am left with what my mom passed on to me. I am left knowing that I was lucky to have had her, even if it was only for 21 years.

There are moments when I catch myself wanting to pick up the phone and call her, just to say hi, to tell her something new and important, or to tell her I love her—words I wonder if I ever said enough.