Payne

My mother's mother passed away a few weeks ago. She had been depressed her whole life and at 95 she took her own life. We understood why, her health and mental well being was failing. but as someone who battles depression and has in the past had suicidal thoughts its jarred me more than I have words for. So I spent the past few weeks trying to focus on the good in my life, and yet I can feel myself spiraling into a full out depression.
I know part of it is because I didn't have a mother. Obviously I had a biological one, and one who was in my house as I grew up. But I never connected the way that many kids do. My roommate lost his mother and I can see the hole that one good mother can leave in a life.
Because I never felt like my mother was my mother due to her addiction I have realized that my heart splintered that one role, my one friends mother who I have known since a teenager is someone I can go to when I need a hug. Another friends mother is there to listen to any bad day and love me anyways. My grandmother was there since I was a baby, she was one of the few people always rooting for me. Always telling me I could do it. Whenever something good happened she was one of the first people I went to tell. She gave me a great love of books, reading, writing, animals, and a deep thirst for knowledge. We used to debate for hours. Much of how I see the world is because of her. In her final years she changed a lot, but a part of me always held on to that person. Infact when I last saw her she chuckled because I showed up at her house with one of my dogs, (she couldn't keep up with having her own) a bag of arby's, and a bud light (she rarely drank so it was a treat she enjoyed) and we talked and debated for hours.
Of course I wish I had spent more time with her but I know that it's a feeling I would have had had I spent hours with her every day. There's no real guilt, or anger, she lived a long happy life. Yet as I watch my friends lose their mom's as we have hit that age and I hear the beautiful stories, I always think of her.
In many ways I have been blessed to have so many beautiful wonderful women enter my heart and help to rebuild it from the damage of my AM. But I can't help but look at my friends who lost their one mother and see their grief and fully understand it and wonder, will I feel this every time with each of these women. Is this the downside of being blessed with them, that I will feel like I lost a mother over and over?
I know as an ACA the sense of loss can be huge for me. Grief itself does not come from this trait, but it changes and perverts itself. I understand that I need to properly grieve and that takes time, I'm not asking to rush it, but does anyone else have this issue I guess?
Whenever I think of the fact that she took a bottle of pills to kill herself I'm not mad that she did it, i'm horribly sad to know the pain that had to ripple through my heart when I debated it, and to think that she spent her final hours alone in that pain. I'm happy she is beyond her physical pain and suffering but that and her loss keep hanging on.