Stevee-Jai’s Story

I lost my mother at the end of November in 2024. It was different to when my father passed. I was young, about 6 or 7 and I’d never meet him. When I had heard he’d passed, I was sad of course. But I never felt the unimaginable wave of grief when my māmā passed. Hers was a short battle with cancer. In September, she was fatigued, lost weight and had stopped working due to it. As a nurse, I feared what those symptoms were. I knew what they could be and as always my mind went to the worst - cancer.

In October she was in hospital with a collapsed lung. As soon as I’d gotten that news I was in the car. What would normally be a four hour drive was down to three, the entire ride I’d smoked a half a packet of cigarettes (I don’t smoke regularly). I was nervous, anxious to figure out what was going on. I prayed it was something manageable like heart disease. She stayed the night in hospital, we had not yet heard any news.

I kept telling myself “no news was good news”. The next day came, I was getting lunch for the both of us when she had called me. “Hey baby girl, the doctor wants to speak to me but he wants you here as well”. My heart dropped to my stomach, I put on a brave voice for my mum, I didn’t want her to worry. The doctor pulled both her and I into the clinical room and showed us the CT. A small consolidation on her lung, a million ideas went through my mind. It looked manageable, I couldn’t see any metastasises, a couple rounds of radiation should do it.

But then the doctor told us that this was her CT from 18 months prior when she was in hospital for an unrelated issue. He clicked the next tab. A 10 cm mass had covered a third of her lung. My eyes were trained on her lymph nodes, the white patches on her liver. I had never felt fear before then.

A few months the doctor had suggested, mum and I laughed and cracked jokes- humour was the only thing keeping us together. “I want to make it to Christmas, we’re having a hangi (traditional Maori dish).”

It wasn’t until we were in the hallway, the sterile environment with white walls and a chemical smell. The realisation hit me all at once. Grief that my mother would pass, anger towards the hospital for missing that initial CT, fear that I would have no parents left alive. I cried as my mother held me, her frame so much smaller than mine yet I felt like her little baby girl.

The next month was a blur, planning her funeral with her, sorting her will, her home and her bills. We had barely scratched the surface when 5 weeks later I hadn’t gotten that dreaded phone call from my brother that she was rapidly declining. I had never wailed like that before, I was home alone with my cats staring at me like I’d lost it. T

hankfully I had made it back home before she’d passed. I was able to hold her hand as she took her last breath. Her funeral was healing, I hate crying in front of people yet I couldn’t stop myself.

Grief is a feeling I had hoped would lay with her in that coffin, leading up to her death I thought once it happened I wouldn’t have to feel like this. I was overly optimistic. It’s a feeling that sits with me everyday, when I’m alone, when I’m surrounded by people, when I’m happy, when I’m making a coffee heck when I’m cleaning the toilet. It’s a cloud that never goes away and I am yet to navigate those feelings.