Grief. Everyone has an opinion on what it looks like, how it should feel. In the five months since my mother has died, I have been consumed by it.
Here is my grief story.
I witnessed grief rise up from my Mother’s hospice bed, conscripted to walk beside her husband, her children, her grandchildren. I saw grief shift to fit the form of each of us, our needs so individual. I watched grief change the faces, the postures, the hearts of my family, as we all went home and tried to live without our Mom.
In my life I can only compare the bond I share with grief to the time I spent with my newborn babies. Always with me, day and night, and if I wasn’t holding them or feeding them, I was attending to them in some other way. Grief feels similar to that. It demands my attention, and it is uncompromising. Grief pays no mind to anything else, and it shouldn’t. There is nothing that compares to the job that it must fulfill. It will not be set aside, for if it is it will only grow in its authority. The loss of another human – especially a parent, has seismic implications, and grief is the guardian of that loss. It is a shapeshifter, unapologetically changing from one moment to the next, without warning. For me, it is my steady companion. It gives me license, it grants permission, it insists, – without consideration of time or place - that I do what I must do to process this loss: sob, rage, sleep, or just sit in my car and cry until there are no more tears, or until this giant hole in my heart covers over with scar tissue.
Sometimes grief is an ethereal shadow of my Mom, walking with me, letting me know she sees how I am hurting, quietly helping me become accustomed to her absence. She brushes by my cheek in a burst of wind. She sings to me through my ear buds, encouraging my tears to run and giving me much needed space in my lungs to take a full breath. Sometimes grief is a reflection of myself. I see her in the windows of the stores as I walk by - she looks like me, but changed. She looks so tired, and demands much sleep. Some days I try to run away from her, when the pain is too raw. Faster and faster I add miles per hour to the treadmill, but she knowingly, patiently waits outside the door to join me as I walk home, matching my tired steps. She forces me to face this unbelievable loss, to look closely at who I am now, so much older in just a short time. She challenges me to consider who I want to be. Sometimes grief is another person, showing me kindness, leaving me vulnerable and awash with gratitude, and in a puddle of tears.
I am at once exhausted by it, thankful for it, resentful of it, but also terrified to be without it. Who knows what life is like when grief has faded into everyday, when it decides I am ready to live without its presence? Will I be ready? Will it have seasoned me? Showed me how to live with the spirit of my Mom without seeing the loss of her?
My soul is too tired to consider that right now. But I suspect grief will force me to, in its own unrelenting way.
