This is not an advice column for many reasons, including:
I am incredibly biased and will always take your side, especially if you’re carrying grief or trauma and the people around you aren’t seeing you.
What works for one person cannot work for all people, and trying to use your own narrow human experience to paint broad strokes for people whose lives you know almost nothing about is less than helpful.
And yet, here I am, replying to an email asking me for advice:
Why is it even though I am a medical professional who knows how many ways people can die, how sad death leaves people, I can’t cope with the loss of my mother? I loved her more than anyone but all I can think of is how many times and how many ways I lost out on the chance to really let her know exactly how much.
She left me, my brother and our kids during a family vacation together (on day 2) in our hotel room in bed next to my teenage daughter. I tried to shake my cold stiff mother awake, thinking she just couldn’t hear me calling her because she was “sleeping on her good ear”.
There’s a terrible long second where my hand touching her cold hand and my brain all registered this fact in a horrible second. Shock, disbelief and a new unwanted reality unfolded in our Manhattan hotel room, while I waited with my mother’s body until a coroner could come examine her. Apparently that takes 8 hours on a weekend.
Lots of time for me to think of our bickering argument the night before, my huffy falling-asleep-in-a-pout without saying good night or I love you, waking up to no more chances to be the daughter she deserved.
The guilt hasn’t lessened, the hole in my life has not shrunk and I still cry in my car every morning on the way to the office to make my 35 patients a day problems better. I have really connected with your writing about grief even before I had this hole in my being.
My mind wanders to the loss like a 7 year old tongue constantly finds the hole where a tooth used to be…. Any advice fellow griever?
My mother is — knock on wood — still alive as I type this. I have bickered with her, I have argued with her, I have, in the height of my teenage awfulness, been so embarrassed by her tripping on the street in New York City in front of hundreds of strangers…that I walked away and left her there.
Shame! Shame! Shame!
And I have also curled into her for comfort, dialed her number just to have her listen as I cry, crawled into her bed to sleep besides her long after I was too big and too old to need that.
But we always need our parents. We are always children, looking for our grown-ups.
The death of a parent makes children of us all. No matter how old we are, how capable in the face of life and other people’s grief. To lose your mother, suddenly and traumatically, to be pushed from the land of the mothered into the land of the motherless while also in a literal room with the people who need you to mother them is…a lot.
It is what my friend Gigi Berry calls a Trauma Lasagna: many cheesy, carby, meaty layers of loss and pain and regret and guilt and shame.
I do not know a single griever who has not burned the roof of their mouth on a hot bite of their own Trauma Lasagna, who hasn’t found themselves tangled in a spiderweb of complicated feelings after a life-altering loss.
I do not know a single griever who has looked at their grief and said, “wow, I’m really handling this perfectly. This loss happened to coincide with a lull in my personal and professional responsibilities, and when my mental health and emotional stability were at an all-time and unshakable high. I processed this appropriately and in ways I can only be proud of.”
If you’re out there, please identify yourself so I can have you kidnapped by social scientists, studied and uploaded to the cloud so we can all have your operating system.
For the rest of us, early grief especially is a lengthy slideshow of all the ways we fell short when our person was alive: the calls we sent to voicemail, the times we raised our voices or our eyebrows, the fights we didn’t have to pick but did anyway.
Without more chances, more tomorrows, we are left with what we did and how we did it.
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