Mom died at home, at night, in her sleep. I was called the following morning, by my sister, who had found Mom’s body, and by the time I got to my parents’ house, the emergency responders had been there, the coroner was there, and the funeral home people were waiting there. Fine and dandy; I had only to drink coffee in the kitchen while the professionals tended to the necessary tasks. I didn’t have to watch. My father, sister, and I selected Mom’s favourite dress for her remains to wear, and left things in the hands of the funeral home. They did things nicely, didn’t force us three to do anything we didn’t want to, and Dad, Sis, and I were all as happy as could be under the circumstances.
Enter the pushy relatives. Mom never wanted an open casket, and we decided to respect her wishes. Me in particular; I preferred my last memory of my Mother as being one of a woman who was not lying in a box. But this was only sort of understood by relatives. Just before the funeral service itself, I was asked, then ordered, by my relatives to “go see your mother one last time before they put the lid down.” I refused; I said I would prefer not to. “You have to,” said one particularly pushy female relative, and literally shoved me towards the open casket. I damn near bumped into the thing, and had no choice but to look at my mother in her pretty dress, but made up like she never was in life and absolutely still; again, like she never was in life.
Yeah, well. I got the hell out of there, and went outside, where I think I smoked two cigarettes at once. My Dad came out and said it was time to get things going and I should be inside. I went, but it was damn difficult to go in there and not blow up at certain relatives.
It was a very difficult time for me, and it was made worse by well-meaning but insensitive relatives.
Being a pallbearer at my uncles funeral. He died so young (29) and was sick for so long. We all literally watched him die from the age of 18. I was about 10 years younger than him and looked up to him a lot.
Mine is a little odd and seems very unimportant in this thread, but for me it was overcoming my fear of heights and climbing the topmast of the Clearwater while she was sailing on the Hudson River.
I climbed that mast twice while I was a volunteer on board her for the week that was the 20th anniversary of Earth Day.
In August of 2006, I survived a solo hike through Horseshoe Canyon in Utah. I was 60 years old, not in good physical condition and had never hiked before. I had no idea what I was up against and hugely minimized how potentially life-threatening it could become. Plus, I stupidly didn’t tell anyone where I was going or when to expect me back. I came damn close to not making it.
But the fact that I did ultimately make it out alive (barely) made it my favorite part of the trip.
I was 23, and just beginning to know her as a person, and not just my mom.
When the time came to say the last things you have the opportunity to say, I didn’t know what to say. I said as much. She said there isn’t anything to say really, except “I love you,” so I said that, and she said it back. I didn’t see her again after that.
She’s been dead for nearly three years now, and every day I think of another thing I should have said while I had the time.
Searching the north Atlantic for four days for a shipmate who had fallen overboard. Watch rotation was four hours on/eight hours off. Four-to-eight a.m. with the ocean and a handheld spotlight is about as lonely as it gets.
Getting through my daughter’s first three months. I felt confident and knowledgeable as I’d worked with children for years, and the prospect of the lack of sleep didn’t bother me too much as I’m a light sleeper anyway. However, nothing could prepare me for the severe post-natal depression I experienced. Physically, the birth of my second child was the worst. It was amazingly brief - two hours from first contraction to cutting the cord - but correspondingly intense. I clearly remember thinking that I would not accept a billion dollars to go through that again.
Wrestling practice every day for three hours with no water break. (How could that possibly have been legal?) A trickle of melting ice from a plastic bag of ice cubes from the trainer’s office was the most water anybody ever got to drink, and that itself was an extreme rarity. Oh, and the heating was turned on, in the rubber-lined room. Were they planning on recruiting us into a desert brigade for the military or something? On the plus side, it made practice for every other sport seem like absolute child’s play.
Dealing with the death of my brother. He committed suicide exactly one week before his nineteenth birthday. I was fifteen at the time and it took me many, many years to let go of him.
Hardest thing I ever chose to do was spend a year as a foreign exchange student when I was 15-16. It was great too, but it was hard, every day, for a lot of reasons. At the end of the year, one girl commented that if we could do this, we could do anything. That’s not quite true, but it’s close.
Hardest experience I’ve ever been through is losing our first pregnancy early in the second trimester. It was complicated. My grad school thesis was due at the same time, which kind of helped and kind of not. That year was just pretty awful, on the whole. I’m glad I never have to relive 1999.
Making the decision to move across the country, knowing that my two oldest children would be staying in California. Even knowing that it would be for the best, in the long run, has not made it easier. I miss them every single day, and knowing that their mother isn’t as focused on them as I would be were I there sucks.
Not giving up on my marriage in the first horrible year. I was amazingly, incredibly unhappy for a while, but wouldn’t “quit,” and I’m glad I didn’t. We’ve been married almost 14 years and most of that has been 99% happy.
Wow. Well, my experience was nothing like that! It was just plain hard work; even when I spoke the language pretty fluently, it was like living in fog all the time. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but it was tough too. That poor kid, that’s awful. I don’t understand why he didn’t contact his local rep and ask for help.
Funny, I don’t hate that Prince song at all. It mostly reminds me of high school dances, back when it was first a hit.
Probably stopping smoking and drinking.
I guess I’ve had it pretty easy.
Interesting how different things affect different people differently. I didn’t find my parents’ deaths all that difficult. After all, they were in their 70s and ill. Looking back at it I think it really hit me hard when my best buddy died at age 50 maybe 15 years ago - a year or 2 before my parents died. I think that I dealt with it at the time by greatly ramping up my alcohol intake. Not the best move…
And putting pets down isn’t fun, but it is something you pretty much figure you are going to have to do when you get a dog or cat.
For me, running a marathon required a continued committment over a long period, but wasn’t really that hard. Physically for me, the toughest thing is probably during martial arts when we would train to a point of exhaustion far beyond anything I experienced while running. I think that made my later running easier for me, because no matter how hard I needed to push myself and how badly it hurt, it was easier than answering a bell for the 10th round with some other guy wanting to tear your head off…
