You were never out of my mind

Dear Lola,

I am sitting here in my hospital room in the Greensville hospital and I hope that you come and visit me. I know that we didn't go apart that well last time when we met many, many years ago. I hope that the address is still yours and you will receive my letter. It looks like I don't have that long to go until I die.

And I want to apologise for everything that I did, but you have to understand my side of view. I am your mother and I thought that this boy wasn't the right one for you. He got you pregnant when you were just eighteen years old and stole your future. He was poor and he grew up in a violent family and he didn't really care about his education.

I had this picture in my mind that you were sitting in a small, dirty flat, somewhere in a big city in that part of town, where you hear gunshots at night, with your baby in your arms, in the middle of the night, waiting for your husband to come home from some kind of pub.

And when he comes he is drunk and he abuses you. I couldn't deal with those thoughts, because for me, you were still my little girl and I wanted to protect you. I was so angry and hurt when you left me and ended the contact.

It took me years to understand you, to understand, that you really loved him and that you didn't want your child to grow up without its father. You saw the good in him, something that I couldn't do. I know that I never gave him a chance and that I only wanted to see the bad in him. I am so sorry. I wish I would have contacted you earlier but I just wasn't brave enough to do that and I was too ashamed. I regret that, I really do.

I hope you accept that and you come and visit me with your child. It is time that I come to know my grandson or my granddaughter. I know that he or she is in her\his twenties now and that I missed out on seeing her\him growing up. I never was the best mother and definitely not the best Nana and I know that. It is too late now to change things and too late to turn everything around, but I want to give it a try to make it at least better. I want to see you one last time and talk to you. 

I have cancer and I don't have long to go. It feels like my sickness is eating me from inside out and I look older with every day that goes by. I feel lonely. I am not scared of death, I am just scared of dying, of the feeling when you leave your body and you have to slide over into another universe, when you have to leave everything behind, your whole life and your family. Some people say, that your life passes you like repetition in fast forward and you see all of your memories again. 

From your childhood until the moment you die. I personally don't believe in that, to be honest. But how could I? I am not dead yet, am I? I will find out. Anyways, even though I don't think that this is real, I like this idea. But I don't want to see my whole life again, when you are not there for me in the end.

I believe that dying feels like falling in the water when you can't swim. You sink deeper and deeper. Some people try to fight for their life, but no matter how hard they try they won't reach the surface. I know that I am going to die and I won't fight for it at the end. When my time comes, it comes and I can't change that.

I just hope that all the pain is gone afterwards. I had a lot of time to think about death in the last couple of weeks and I am excited to see what comes after life. Is it heaven and hell or do you get reborn? Is there even something coming after life, or is it just nothing? I don't know what I should believe in. I mean heaven sounds nice, but I think that you might get bored up there, after a couple of years.

And I don't want to think about hell.This is no place I would like to go. Reborn is not so bad, as long as you don't get reborn as a spider. I don't want to believe, that there comes nothing after life. I can't imagine, that I will not exist in any way after I die.

How is it, when there is nothing, when you don't exist anymore? Where does everything go, what makes me myself? This option is one of the worst, when you ask me. It comes straight after hell. I hope that whatever comes next is better, then the pain I am feeling right now, because of the chemotherapy and medication.

I hope I didn't shock you my dear child. I don't know why, but these words just build up in my head and my hand wrote it down. I couldn't stop it and it felt good to write it all down. I kind of sorted my mind by writing it down.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter instead of throwing it away without reading it, that it what I would have done in your position. I hope you have a think about coming and visiting me or just replying to this letter, if you don't want to see me.

With Love your Mum,

Amelia.