June was the weirdest, hardest, most emotional month of my entire life.

My second son, Ethan, was born. I took a week off work to get to know him.

Three days later my mother died from terminal breast cancer. Brain Metastases. After two years of fighting the vile thing, we were all shocked when we found it had spread to her brain. 8 weeks after the diagnosis of “brain mets” she was dead.

A few days after that, my other son caught a very nasty dose of Chicken Pox. As he was getting over that, he was rushed into hospital with suspected meningitis. After blood tests, a terrifying night in hospital, and a chest x-ray, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Watching my three year old child bleeding out of a cannula in his arm, looking as scared and tiny and confused as I’ve ever seen him is a memory burned into my mind.

It was Mum’s birthday two days before her funeral. She would have been 53. I carried her coffin. I’m quite proud of that. Many of us wore pink. I’m proud of that too.

A few days after that, Ethan got Chicken Pox. Doctors had told us things could be “complicated” if that happened.

At the end of June, I went back to work feeling like I’d lived a lifetime’s worth of emotions in a single month. Joy, sadness, despair, terror, pride, worry, doubt; I’ve run the gamut. It was like the part of me that takes care of emotions had gone into critical meltdown. Engineers are still working to get things back online. Sometimes I think they’re starting to get somewhere, sometimes I don’t.

I miss Mum. We’re over half way through July now, a month and a half after her death, and I miss her terribly. I was tidying up my Gmail contacts the other day, and found her listed. While moving my contacts onto my new iPhone, I saw her number. I haven’t been able to delete them yet, insane as that sounds.

My life can’t stop even though sometimes I just want everything to freeze. I’ve caught myself humming the Dr Horrible Freeze-ray song since Act One. Yes, I am bonkers. I know I have to keep going for my two wonderful boys, my wife, my Dad, my sister, everyone I love: my family.

I’ve been so directly exposed to the miracle of life – and I find it (scientifically speaking) amazing that new life can be created in the way that it is – that I should be able to find a great deal of comfort in the cycle of things.

But the double whammy of that and the finality of death – a death that seems so mercilessly unfair and without reason that it forces you to question whatever crazy rules the universe actually exists by – in such a short space of time is difficult to process.

At times I’ve felt like I’m watching somebody else; that this isn’t actually happening to me. I was convinced at one point that the whole thing was a dream. As I sat in the hospital waiting room with my son, watching the big red digital clock on the wall click over onto Friday the 13th, and seeing the nurses that hooked my Mum up to a morphine pump on the last night of her life milling about, for a moment I felt with absolute certainty that I wasn’t awake.

That’s a terrifying sensation: it’s often that people say “I thought I was dreaming”, but being confused about what’s real and what’s not, trying to shake the feeling that everything around you can’t possibly be real, whilst at the same time knowing that it is, very, terribly, inescapably real, is like psychological vertigo.

July is another month. August will be too. One day at a time, one month at a time.

Ethan’s spots have cleared up. While his feeding may have dropped off slightly during his illness, he’s feeding so well it’s difficult to notice. My oldest son is doing much better. Returning to work restored a sense of normality, but avoiding that normality made the situation seem not quite so real.

Being back in a routine that Mum isn’t part of doesn’t feel right. It’s not normal. I suppose now I need to define a new normal.

Now, normal is a life where I can’t call her on my way home from work and set the world to rights. I can’t ask her how long I’m supposed to cook a piece of beef for. I can’t call in at lunchtime with a chicken salad cob.

Normal, for now, is seeing my Mum’s email address and filling up with tears.

I can’t possibly express in one post how great mum was. There’s a very good chance that you, dear reader, didn’t know her and don’t know me. But if you’ve lost someone to cancer – or just lost someone incredibly dear to you – and you feel like I’ve felt, hopefully you’ll read this and know that you’re not alone. Even though, at times, you’ll be absolutely convinced that you are.

I suppose this post is written entirely as an attempt at catharsis. It’s not a eulogy to mum, that’s for sure, although you might well see one of those on these pages at some point. I’m hoping that writing this helps – if not me, then some other reader who might stumble across it.

In either case, it will have been worthwhile.