‘Grief chips at you making you feel like a bystander to your life’

"Mam was a beautiful person inside and out. She was kind, bubbly and you couldn't ask for someone who was rooting for you more than her", blogger Adelle Kenny says of her mother Geraldine Byrnes who died last year from glioblastoma, a form of terminal brain cancer.

Geraldine was only 62 when she died and had fought breast and bowel cancer in the decade previous.

"Brain cancer was the worst in terms of how devastating it was to her. The only small positive in all of this is that she has finally left cancer behind her" says Adelle who abseiled down Thomond Park earlier this year to raise money for Brain Tumour Ireland.

Life's busyness continued around me but everything felt mute. A part of me has not accepted she is gone

Geraldine was heavily involved in her grandchildren’s lives right through from Adelle’s complicated pregnancy with her twins, to helping take care of them when Adelle returned to work.

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“We became closer in this time and I feel incredibly lucky that I saw her most days. We talked a lot about parenting now versus when she became a mother.

“I will always be grateful for the closeness that deepened and, of course, seeing the twins flourish from their Nana Geraldine’s influence.”

‘Tiring, upsetting, frustrating’

Coping with her mother’s illness placed huge demands on Adelle and her young family as she attempted to juggle working, spending time with her mother and seeing to the needs of her twins, who were not yet three. “They didn’t really understand, firstly, the heightened emotions and secondly, why I was away from home more”, she explains.

“I did find it hard, more so emotionally. Yes, it was tiring, upsetting, frustrating, but at the back of it my mother was dying, so whilst at times I might have had a momentary wobble, I did what I had to do to support her and also be the best mother I could be”.

Adelle says it “was a very sad and confusing time” for her twins when her mother died. “Life’s busyness continued around me but everything felt mute. A part of me has not accepted she is gone. It was a year since she died recently. It feels like a lifetime, but yet so short and right now it gets harder accepting that I won’t speak with her ever again, or hear her voice.

“Grief chips at you making you feel like a bystander at times to your own life but I have to get up, function, be present and be there for my children. Yet it is hard to want to close a door on it because in a way that feels like I am forgetting her and I never want to do that.

“I miss her on the other end of the phone always there with advice if I needed. It hurts that she is going to miss out on her grandchildren’s lives. Her influence in my early years as a mother to the twins will live long into their future.

“There are always going to be times when I want nothing more than to talk with her about the twins I will do my best to remember what she has taught me.”

Read: I named my daughter in honour of my father