That Funny Feeling

A Short Entry about The End

By Valkyrie Holmes

I was busy doing work today and realized I hadn’t written anything in a while. I had been nonstop writing my book for a while now and took a break because work got in the way and now I want to hop back on the bandwagon but not until I write what’s on my mind.

I’m currently sitting on the floor of my room listening to a record from Vinyl Moon (“The Sunshine State — Cliff Drive” if you wanna get in the mood), and I realized during my work period that I felt uneasy. Slightly awkward sitting on the floor in front of my tiny desk. My friend Ben texted me and mentioned that he had read one of my articles and liked how introspective it was. I felt thankful and decided to look into the article I had written just a few months ago.

My 19th birthday article, “The Good, The Bad, and the Shrooms” was written January 13th. A lot has happened since then. I scrolled through, reading certain parts of it and smiling to myself and then scrolled down to the part I was really interested in: the portion entitled HATE. The first sentence of that paragraph is “My mom got cancer this year.” I’ll spare you the details but I ended off that section by saying I was extremely optimistic and that I wouldn’t stop believing until she did.

Over the last couple months, I’ve been traveling to San Fransisco, Miami, Austin, all over the place. And in that time, my mother has gotten increasingly worse. Every call from the moment I left to the moment I came back a few days ago just increasingly filled my senses with disgust and hatred. Every other call was detailing another test with more cancer or another surgery with hopes of getting better. My mom was in the hospital for weeks at a time between my birthday and today. Whenever I was back in Vegas, I stayed with her at the hospital for days: wake up, go to the hospital, leave the hospital, go to bed.

She got a colostomy bag after a surgery rerouting her digestive tract, multiple screenings, and every time, just worse and worse news. And finally, she came home a couple days ago with the message to “get comfortable”.

My family is waiting for my mother to die.

Everyone is. And after so many months and months of staying optimistic, I feel like it did nothing at all. I started to wonder whether it was even worth it to stay positive. I think back to the pact I made with my mom, “You’re not allowed to give up until I do, and I’m not giving up.” That was back in May of 2022 after we got the diagnosis. And now I feel as though I could have had any outlook on the situation, positive or negative, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been slightly easier for me to say that it was all lost and forget about trying so hard. But now, it’s like the promise I made to myself, to my mom, was just broken and out of my control. Like promises mean nothing. It’s hard to be a stoic when life is so fucked up sometimes.

“My mom died of cancer.”

That’s something I used to read. You watch movies where characters lost their loved ones to cancer. You hear stories and feel sorry. But now it’s happening to me. And you can’t help but think, “This shouldn’t be happening to me.” You can’t help but think this should only be something suffered by people in storybooks to teach a valuable lesson, that whatever sick fuck created this disease wasn’t trying to teach lessons but was trying to strip families of their happiness and love and peace. You continue to think that this kind of thing can’t happen to me. But it does and it keeps happening.

This past month, I’ve talked to some people who’ve lost their family members to cancer and it never seems real. I’ve found myself helping my mom this week and thinking to myself, “My mom has cancer,” like I just found out yesterday. It doesn’t feel like something that should happen to me, to human beings, to anything.

You will never truly understand what it means to die until you’ve seen someone go through it in front of you. You see the deterioration of their body, the shocking amount of time they sleep, the no appetite, the moans and groans of pain, the twitching, the sudden chills, the morphine, the methadone, the hydrocodone, over and over and over and over…

And I can’t help but think there’s nothing I can do about it. I can just sit and watch, offer my hand, and watch as it slowly means less and less that I’m there. That it slowly matters less and less whatever I think or thought in the past, that the body just slowly ceases to hold consciousness.

You can never prepare yourself for death. I think I mentioned in the past article that it would have helped if I knew about the seven stages of grief and the experiences of others but it doesn’t really matter. It will never truly and accurately describe the feeling of losing someone you love or that you feel like you want to repay. I spent so long being a shitty teenager and don’t even get to shower my mother with gifts and grandchildren. You don’t factor losing your mom into your life as a teenager, in fact most people shouldn’t. The world would be too dark and gloomy then. But just the fact that now, at 19 years old, I know I won’t go into my 20s with my mom by my side, is the definition of feeling hopeless.

I realized that this was what I was feeling. As I sit here and cry and think about life before and after, I can’t help but think about the after. I keep telling people that my next business trip revolves around my mom’s death, as weird as that sounds. But I know its not that simple. I think I originally framed it in my head like my mom is going to pass away and there will be a funeral and I’ll be sad for a little while and get right back into work. But the more I write, the more I exist in a house and sit on a couch with my mom who is slowly dissipating, the more I realize it’s so far from the truth.

So what then? Do I wait to take another trip until I’m healed? Do I continue working? Every last sentence I say could be the last she hears from her oldest daughter, every hand hold and hug could be the last she has. I could get woken up in the middle of the night by my dad with the awful news, she could pass away in front of my eyes, I could get a call in the middle of the night if I’m in another fucking state. And I can’t do anything about it.

I’ve been feeling like I’m in limbo today. Like all these fantastic things are happening, like finding a cofounder and applying to YC, getting my startup off the ground and working with fabulous people to continue progress, meeting amazing people in climate that care about their missions. And then there’s this crazy juxtaposition. Everything is great until it isn’t. Everything is going well until I zoom out and realize I’m losing my mom.

I remember when I was in San Fransisco and I was walking back from a makerspace and I called my mom to talk to her about her being in the hospital and how she was doing. We talked for a while and she said that they had to do surgery and that it wasn’t looking good. And I remember a sad, “Oh Valkyrie, I’m so sorry.” Like this was her fault. Like the things she was experiencing was somehow letting me down. And you have no idea how many times that audio has played in my mind, like it’s the last thing I’ll ever hear. And she’s said it a bunch of times since then but it was the first time I knew she had to break the pact. She was giving up; her body was forcing her to throw in the towel.

And now, I want to have conversations with her. But it all seems so hard for her. And the pain is either too much for normal speech or she’s scraping by on painkillers. I don’t know if my experience is unique. I hope in some ways it is. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And I keep thinking about the things I’ll regret when she’s gone, like questions I should have asked or more time I should have spent. Work can wait, people say. Family first, people say. Yes, yes, yes but you never know what regrets you have until after the time passes.

This is all a big brain dump of sorrow. I hope this isn’t entertaining to people. In fact, I hope this finds you in a time of deep emotional reflection. I hope people can cry with me and this short story. I spend a lot of my time being angry with the situation and a lot of time crying. I think that’s normal. I’m not going to pretend like I’m not angry with life because I am. As privileged as I can recognize I am, that doesn’t excuse the impact cancer has on your life. In the beginning, you always think about the things she’ll miss but you push it to the back of your mind. But now, I can’t help but think about it as if it’s already happening.

My mom will never hold my children. My mom will never dance with me at my wedding. She’ll never help me pick out a wedding dress or decorate my forever home. She’ll never teach my kids how to read or write or bring them gifts. She’ll never be able to live long enough for me to pay off my childhood home or to buy her castle. My dad is losing the love of his life after 20 years of marriage. My sisters are losing their mom before they get to graduate. And it’s no longer a sad figment of my imagination.

That’s just the truth.

I hope that when she goes it’s peaceful. I hope it’s just a slow drift into whatever afterlife means to her. I hope I’m here when it happens. I hope people resonate with this in some way. Im not looking for sympathy. I want people to ask questions. I want to know what others think. I want to educate in a way that makes sense. You hear things about death that are flowy: “they go into the light”, “they go to heaven”, “she passed away in her bed”. But cancer is a rickety fall to the grave, at least in my case.

I do want people to reach out. I want to be a resource, someone to talk to. Someone that’s real, that can be there. And this is a real look into my head at the current moment. Maybe I’ll feel different about it after it’s done. But this is a very real glimpse into what death looks like. I was going to end off this short article by saying something about my “you’re not special” mantra so I could sound profound but you all know it at this point. And this experience solidifies that for me.

Reach out at vholmes113@gmail.com.