Hi Dibsey.
Grief has a way of doing this years after the event - i found myself crying for my mum 11 years after she died completely out of the blue - over a random xmas carol that came on over the radio. -and the run up to christmas, is, i think an emotional trigger anyway - after all usually it was our mums who made it special - and as we get older ourselves and look back on that time i think we remember that even more not just christmass but things from childhood which maybe we do less looking back on as younger adults.
There is no certain answer to your second question -but i think most nurses with years of experience would tell you from that experience, that she would have been aware of your presence - perhaps not always consciousely, but in the same way any of us would if some-one held our hand as we slept - surfacing from sleep every so often to be re-assured that some-one is there who loves us.From my experiences i would agree with them.
The question about carrying out her wishes afterwards is the one that cant really be answered because we simply dont know. People have different views on it - maybe because of religion or other cultural beliefs - maybe because of their own experiences - and in recent times the discovery of quantum physics sugests possabilitys onece dismissed by science - again from my experiences i do believe in those possabilitys.
Initially when some-one dies we go into a kind of shock ourselves and our minds way of coping is to push away some of the questions around it -they then resurface later and perhaps this is also the reason you are feeling the way you are about it now.
Within our society we are also told all sorts of platitudes and expectations and not allowed to grieve properly because our society cant cope with it, they want us back in the slot we were in before - - you hear so many times they had a good life and theyre a better place,and so we dont process our grief properly or that it actually changes who we are - we cant simply go back into the slot we were in before.
Western culture sees "getting over it" as cutting the bond between us and that person -whereas we dont have to do that - the bond has changed but it isnt brocken because all that the person was too us, remains with us - especially some-one like a mum who is such a fundamental part of our lives,so for me "acceptance" isnt about cutting the ties but about accepting that it now takes a different form and exploring how we can do that and still hold onto it.Sometimes this means we have to challenge accepted beliefs of those around us and look for something we can be happy with within ourselves.
