Grief

When Mom died in ninety-seven I was devastated. I moved through the days in a kind of fog and spent my nights crying and writing. Poetry was my outlet; I wrote and wrote and wrote. The first few weeks I wrote constantly, night after night, from around 10pm when my husband would leave for work, until midnight or later. As time progressed I wrote less frenziedly, but still on a fairly regular basis. The poetry after a couple of months took on less grief as I tried to find a happier, more joyful place. But the grief and longing were still a frequent part of my writing. I longed to go back to the days when she was alive and we would go out to coffee, or sit on the front porch and watch Debbie (my daughter) play. Or even further back to the nights that we would make chocolate pudding and eat it warm with bread with salted butter while we watched Benny Hill and laughed.  Or perhaps even further back to when we were children and we would make her (which she did it willingly) come to our restaurant and order food from hand written menus. And no matter what she always ate and drank and complimented the chef. You would have thought it really as burgers and soda instead of crackers and Kool-Aid.  Or play softball games in the yard, or pull grass off short to make rooms and roads for the fairies. Those where the things that I missed. I missed the daily phone calls (sometimes 3 or 4 a day) for you see I not only lost my Mom, I lost my Best Friend.

After a while I gathered all the poetry I had written about my loss and stapled it together.  I added pictures of Mom and the family, and put a cover on it, entitled: ”Good-bye Mom”. It was my tribute to her, but I think in a strange way it was also a tribute to my grief. The problem was there was no one to share it with, my sisters and Dad were handling grief in their own way and it was not mine. I think we shut each other out for a while in the pain instead of coming together to celebrate what we had and what we had lost. Grief has the potential to rip a family apart faster than the proverbial “speeding bullet”. What seems like a time when we should come together in support and comfort, doesn’t always work out exactly as we think it should. Grief is certainly a test of a family’s dynamics. I felt alone and lost no one to talk to who understood my pain. I’m not sure my husband knew what to do for me and my daughter was too young and dealing with her own pain and loss. She had lost a playmate as well as her Grammy. We talked and cried together, to have share the extent of my own soul searing pain would have been unfair and detrimental. Or at least that was my opinion, and still is to a degree. But thank goodness for Mike and Deb they became my reason to get up each morning and try to make each day as normal as possible.

People/Society in general seems to out an expectation of time on grieving. Kind of like at the end of two weeks you are supposed to let it all go and life will return to normal. I have yet to meet anyone who has been able to do this. I mean on the outside we do, we put on a mask and pretend life is good, when inside we sort feel like curling up in the corner and crying. Grief does ease over time, it never really goes away as such, it just gets simpler or perhaps we learn to handle it better. Why do we grieve? They are no longer here to feel hurt, pain, or suffering. I think we grieve for ourselves and that which we no longer have. Does that make us selfish? I don’t think so – but I wonder if we grew up dealing with death as an everyday facet of life, talking about it as if it were something other than a great mystery, if it wouldn’t be better, healthier, cause less suffering and grief, and less fear for all. It has taken me many years to come to term with that single death and to release all the grief and pain that surrounded it.

I think I have a better understanding now, for I have been through more deaths since and each one seems to bring with it a greater understanding or perhaps acceptance. My Mom used to say “ that everyone handles death and grief differently. Some immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and feeling of their loved one and the loss, then there are those who pack it all away and take it out later and deal with piece by piece, a little at a time. There are even those who put it away and try to pretend that it never happened, that their loved one is simply in the other room, but eventually they will have to deal with it, for it will catch up. ” I think I leaned heavily in to the immersion technique. I packed a few memories away and didn’t open them for many years just knowing they were in the closet was a comfort for me, but emotionally I immersed myself as much as I could in the hopes of getting through it more quickly. There is no right or wrong way to grieve; we just have to remember that everyone does it differently, even within a family. The fifteenth anniversary of my Mother’s death is only a couple of weeks away and I can now look back with sadness for our loss but the pain is gone. So there is hope even if it seems beyond all hope in the beginning. I still miss her every day as does all my family, but I have come to realize that life doesn’t end with death it simply moves on to the next stage or dimension. My Mom is on the other side of the veil and I will meet her spirit again one day and I will celebrate that reunion.