MY PERSONAL HARDSHIP by Diane Cuff-Carney

When this prompt was presented by ACW yesterday as a topic to write about, my first thought was, “I never experienced hardship”. Unlike so many people I know, knew, interacted with and loved throughout my 70+ years, I never suffered as many had. Over the course of my professional career I had treated holocaust survivors and their families, women and children of domestic violence, the homeless and impoverished. These were the true examples of misfortune and hardship as I defined it.

But, this morning, rethinking the term and broadening the scope of its personal definition for me I realized that I was defining hardship at its extreme privation. The hardship I experienced in my average life is one experienced by many others, the loss of parents and being childless.

I am an only child who was raised by hard working parents. They survived the Great
Depression, WWII, and financial strife. I was loved. I was educated. I was never hungry, yet I was often lonely. My mother and I achieved a deepening closeness following the death of my father in 1983. Without him to focus on we now had each other to get to know in a deeper way. We were no longer confined in our roles as mother and daughter. We were now two women, two friends, who spent every Friday together until her death in 2000.

On October 19, 2000, I found my mother deceased on her living room floor. We had spent the previous day together. I had made peanut butter cookies for her to take home and had cut her hair. As she departed out my front door I had a transient thought that became a premonition, “What if I never see her again?”

The experience of my grief over her loss had resurrected the grief I never had time to face after the death of my father. This hardship of adjusting to a life without them came in waves of sadness and deepening loneliness. I would experience it while sitting alone sipping a coffee at Starbucks. I watched mothers with their infants in strollers connecting with other mothers, laughing, sharing their stories, sharing their motherly wisdom with each other. Viewing their joy from my vantage point only made my deep emotional pain more poignant.

The hardship experienced as an adult only child following her loss became a personal burden that I could not share even with the love and support from my husband. I could not escape the discomforting sorrow. I felt confused, disoriented, living in a void that no one else but I could fill. I felt my mother’s absence everywhere. Without parents, siblings, or children, only me, I was on a new journey, alone, to figure out who I was, who I could be, who I wanted to be.

In these last 25 years I have come to realize that hardship has many dimensions, many degrees of intensity and that it is a very personal experience. So, I’m happy to report that I have come to know myself, deeply, with pride and with humility as a person of many dimensions, traveling through space and time with the rest of you. I walked through this personal hardship, came out the other end, and learned that I will be OK, no matter what comes next.