I've never used this service before so I'm not sure what I want out of it but I feel like I need to get my feelings out, so here goes! 

*Trigger warning- I go into a bit of detail about how my mom looked toward the end so please don't read if that may affect anyone* 

My mom was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016. It then went to her lungs and she was a heavy smoker so I spent most of my teenage years arguing with her about smoking and how it's going to kill her if she didn't stop. I was very hands-on and she turned into my teenage daughter, hiding cigarettes and sneaking out to buy packs. She refused to stop and the cancer slowly spread and she was taken off treatment in February 2022. I was finishing my 3rd year of university at the time so I wasn't around too much but my mom and I were very close, in fact as a child my one fear was that she was going to die. I was very much in denial that she would die from the cancer so I wasn't alarmed at all until we went on holiday in June of 2022 and she could no longer walk. I started becoming very scared and angry so I hid away. 

my sister is 8 years older than me and has a car so she was always taking our mom to appointments and such, we are a very close-knit family so we were all involved in my mom's journey. When I started to hide away, my sister took on a lot of the emotional responsibility for the family which I already felt bad about, but I would say to myself that if it got too bad, I'd move back home and help my sister more.

That didn't happen though. I went with my boyfriend to visit his family in July, but as my mom was calling less and less and sleeping more, I was just too scared to go home to see what she looked like now, so I ended up staying in Ireland with my boyfriend for a month. I would have stayed longer but my sister called me one day saying that she thinks it's going to be time soon.

I came back to an absolute shell of a woman. My mom could no longer go to the bathroom, sit up, or eat, and it was all too much for me. It had also spread to her brain so she wasn't really in the real world a lot of the time, and she'd sometimes lash out and forget what was happening as a result. I was too scared to be alone with her and I couldn't bear to look at her for too long because of how frail she had become. 

Towards the end, we thought we were going to lose her 3 times before she actually passed away, so about a week before she passed I stupidly thought I could go back to my home in a different city for a job interview and still be there to say goodbye. As if a job interview was more important than my mom's death. 

Within that week, she'd passed away. I got the earliest train I could but I wasn't there for her. I wasn't there for my nan or my sister. I should have come back from Ireland earlier and I shouldn't have left for a stupid job that I ended up leaving a month after I got. 

I can't handle the guilt. Not so much toward my mom, because she was away with the fairies towards the end, and my nan showed her a voicenote of my voice just a few hours before she passed so I know that she knew I was there. 

it's the guilt towards my sister that I can't get over. She was brushing my mom's hair, putting lip balm on her lips when they got too dry, and dealing with her pain relief and the palliative care team, she organized the whole funeral and I was doing nothing. I had completely shut down after she passed and I couldn't be there for her. I love my sister with my whole being, she's my best friend. And it really hurt her when I wasn't there. We've spoken about it since and she said that it did take a while to get over the resentment towards me, which is completely understandable.

I get that when you look back you notice hundreds of things you would have done differently, but I can't shake the guilt and regret I feel towards my sister for leaving her on her own.

I keep saying that I deserve to feel this way, I need to be punished in some way, but my partner keeps defending me. I don't want to be defended, I don't want to be told that everything is fine, I feel like I need to feel the guilt to balance things out. 

I'm just at a loss.