The Complexities of Grief

My mother has left this world.  For a better one, to be sure…but even knowing that, it is so very sad and so very strange, surreal even, to believe that she is no longer in this one, where I can see her, touch her, speak to her.  Losing your mother makes you feel untethered. After all, she is your first home.  It just feels wrong to live in a world that doesn’t have her in it.

But my mother’s death has affected me in ways I could not have foreseen.  My father died in 2016, and over the years since then, the grief I felt at his passing has lost its sharp edges.  I can think of him these days with fondness and peace, and only every once in a while do my memories bring tears. Now, however, it’s all come back to me: there's that stabbing pain again; but this time around it has an even greater force, because my mom was my last surviving parent.  I fear the grieving process will be much longer and more complex this time around.

I knew that at 89, Mom didn’t have too many years left. Even so, I didn’t like to dwell on the possibility of losing her.  But the unthinkable has become a harsh reality.  

Grief is a funny, unpredictable thing.  It’s sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.  It strikes at times when it doesn’t seem to make sense, and then stays hidden when it seems it should be brought into the light.

This morning when we got to church for Mass, a few of our fellow daily Mass friends asked how I was doing, and I was able to answer them dry-eyed.  I headed over to our usual pew, worried that I might seem cold to them, too “doing okay” for a person who’s just lost her mom.  But minutes after kneeling to pray and then settling in my seat, my eyes suddenly welled up with tears, brought on by a random memory.  

I cried copious tears during the week and a half that I spent with my mother during her last days on earth—but usually when alone, or with just my husband present.  And I cry often these days when my husband and I say our daily Rosaries aloud together.  (I’m a private griever, perhaps?  Could that be it?)

After the initial trauma of that awful time in the hospital was past and she’d been gone about a week or so, I found that I was crying a good bit less often throughout the day, and I worried that only a very hard heart could “get over” a mother’s death so soon.  Ha!  As if.

Each day, it seems, I am hit out of the blue at odd times with an image or a memory that brings tears to my eyes: when I think of how happy my mom always, always was when my husband and I arrived for a visit, for instance—and the extreme delight she took in our sons (and even more so, in their children, her beloved great-grandchildren)…when I remember the way she reached her hand out, from her hospital bed (on one of the days before she became unresponsive), and grabbed mine, letting me know that she wanted me to lean in for a kiss…when I think of how one night as we were leaving the hospital, I said goodbye but then went back in to give her another kiss and tell her, “I’m glad you’re my mom,” and in her weak, quiet voice, she replied that she was glad, too.  (It would be one of our last conversations, because not too long after that, she could no longer move or talk.)  I tear up when I realize that when we are up in NY for the summer (where we go every year, to escape the VA heat and manage our Oyster Haven VRBO house), I won't be seeing her, bringing dinners for her, going for girls'-day-out lunches or shopping trips with her and my two sisters. Sometimes, all it takes to get me crying is looking at an image of Our Lord or Our Blessed Mother.  It’s a very fragile time for my emotions, even though I’m sure it often appears to the world as if I’m a rock, extremely stoic and handling my mom’s passing with more than the usual amount of equanimity.

I’m trying not to worry about how strange my brand of grief seems to be.  It is what it is, I guess.  One of my dear loyal readers, Madeline, left this comment on my last post: “Be gentle with yourself—there’s no right or wrong way to process a death.”

Those are words that I needed to hear right now, as I navigate through this confusing maze that is the grieving process.  Thank you, my friend.

(Please dear readers, pray for the repose of the soul of my spunky, funny, one-of-kind mother.  She was the bee's knees, she really was.)