What I Learned At My Mother's Funeral

I have spoken about my mother’s death before, and how it affected me. I wrote about my survivor’s guilt and how I struggled with it for a few months; I’m still working through it. But in those months following her death, one event affected me more than I realized: her funeral. And in a positive way, no less.

My mother died on 18th December 2024, at the age of 68, from complications from bowel cancer. On the 23rd, we had her funeral. And it was packed. Everybody was there. Everybody from our immediate family, all of her close friends and business associates were there. We’re talking about a small town here, the kind where everybody knows everybody, and even a few of her neighbours and acquaintances came too. And the thing is, she never would have believed it.

For years, my mother kept saying that nobody loved her. We told her many, many times that that simply wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to hear it. Her trauma about my grandmother, who sadly also passed away, in February, never really left her. Because they didn’t have the best relationship, she thought she wasn’t worthy of love. She carried those feelings with her for years. And when her best friend was driving me home from the hospital the day before my mother died, we talked about that. We talked about how tragic it was that my mother was going to die thinking nobody loved her.

I kept thinking about that at her funeral. Now granted, funeral attendance might not necessarily mean that much when it comes to how people really, truly felt about you. It’s just a ceremony after all, and people go for different reasons. But having heard the stories people told me about my mother on that day and how fondly they spoke of her, I honestly believe most of the people who were there loved her. If only she knew how her death has turned everyone’s lives upside down... This has made me think about the way I perceive myself.

At a certain point in our lives, we all think we have turned into our parents. This is what I always heard people say and I never really believed it was true, until I started hearing my mother whenever I spoke about myself in relation to my friendships. When I was a kid, I was very self-conscious about my friendships. I never really had that many friends growing up and I always thought there must be something wrong with me. As a teenager, I came out of my shell a little bit more and I started making more friends. But still, I always thought my friends were ‘cooler’ and more popular than I ever was. I often wondered if they really loved me, if they really wanted to hang out with me, if they liked someone else better… This was probably just my chronic shyness talking, ironically, but it is something I suspect most people have thought about at some point in their lives. Those thoughts sometimes still creep up on you as you get older, but the thing is, you shouldn’t believe them.

Of course I know my friends love me. And your friends love you too. It’s like those posts you see on social media about how you never really know how you affected someone’s life, or how someone is smiling because they are remembering something you said. As toxic as social media can be sometimes, when those posts come up, it can also be quite wonderful. We are all more loved than we realize. And it’s time we realized that.