Hi all,

I've just recently started posting here. I found this site by accident. I am a member of the Neuropathy group. My mom committed suicide three years ago. I'm going back to my home town to visit my friends in two weeks for the first time since her funeral three years ago.

I've pretty much finished mourning her death, I don't cry every day, I can talk about her death without breaking down, and all the "confusion" is gone. I understand it more now. Why, because she was sick. She needed help and her husband was too "uneducated" to understand what she was going through. Although, if she was determined, it may not have mattered how educated he was, she would have found a way.

My point is, I went there after her death, I went there three months later to go through the family pictures, etc. with my step father, (which I still talk to once a month just to stay close to him), but it's been three years since I've been in the house, he said it's changed. I'm worried when I go in that I won't "feel" her there any more. I've lived across the country from my mom for thirty years, so I'm used to not being near her, but I'm used to when I go home every five years or so, going into her home and being near "her".

I'm just sad that this is the first time I'm going home to an empty house. I know that those of you who have lost someone you live with have to do that on a daily basis have to do that every day, and I'm so sorry for you. I don't know how you do it. I guess that's why I'm here. How do I do it? How do I walk into her house without her there? Without her things there? Without her smell? Her hugs to greet me?

Just writing this has brought back all the tears! I thought I was done with them. I thought I had cried all the tears I could cry. I'll never stop crying for my mom. No one ever stops needing their mother!

Thank you all for being there.

(Oh, and if any of you are mothers, and have serious depression issues, and consider suicide, please read this again and again! ) I am 47 years old. My mother would be 63 years old. I am a grandmother myself. We lived 3000 miles apart. We spoke on the phone AT LEAST once a week, usually more than that. I was her ONLY daughter. She had three boys also. She used to beat me with sticks, belts, brushes, wooden spoons, metal cooking utensils, anything she could pick up when she was angry, she would nail my door shut, she would get drunk and pull my hair out, she would climb in bed with me when her husband would beat her, and lie next to me and cry while I comforted her, she would call me across the country when she was drunk to yell at me after I left home because she didn't have me there to hit any more. Finally I wouldn't speak to her if she had been drinking. She learned not to call me unless she was sober and we could have good conversations. I could tell by her voice if she had been drinking and I would hang up on her. She knew not to call back because I wouldn't answer. She was a terrible mother, but she was MY mother. She was all I had! I loved her because she was MY mother! She was ill! She was an alcoholic, she was depressed, she was bi-polar. Because she was so deathly afraid of losing her children, she would not seek out help, she did not want to be hospitalized like her mother and sister and get electric shock therapy. When she came to visit, I wouldn't let her hold her first grandchild because when she got off the plane, she was wearing a cowboy hat and hollering like a cowboy, she was drunk! She threw a fit in the middle of the airport. I dealt with it. It was also the first time she had met my husband. The next morning, she apologized, and she held my daughter. Sometimes I mothered her more than she mothered me.

I got help. I have raised my daughters so differently. I am on medication. I know my mother was sick. But I still miss her. There were moments when she was so nurturing and loving, and that is what I hold onto. Those are the memories I keep. That is the mother I have in my heart!