Grief Spurts

After my mom died, my family friend who’d lost her mother over 20 years ago kept telling me, “It doesn’t get easier, but it finds its place.” I’d heard similar things from friends, like, “It takes time” and you know, the kinds of things you hear from TV shows where someone dies and everyone is sad for one episode and then they never talk about it again.

As I’ve said before, I can confirm that this is true. Over two years after my mom died, I can say that the grief has “found its place.” But I also feel as though I’ve been experiencing something lately that I can only refer to as “grief spurts.” Lately it’s like I’m experiencing a different type of grief than I did even six months or a year ago. For a long time, it felt like my grief was kind of a dull ache or phantom limb. It was something I felt aware of at all times, a sad, lingering sensation. However these days it feels more like a pinprick. I never know when my finger is going to accidentally find itself on the opposite end of a sharp needle, but when it does, oh boy is it a bad sight. A few weeks ago, I found myself feeling badly that I couldn’t ask my mom what she thought of some TV show, and then, of course, the realization, of course, that I was missing out on her opinions about just about everything in the world, and I spent the rest of the day gutted. These are, of course, all things I know on a minute level, but when I allow myself to really feel it, it’s the emotional equivalent of a spill on aisle 9 and instead of anyone even trying to clean it up, the grocery store just has to close for the day.

A few months ago, I was talking to someone about “feeling” our age. I think the way most people have felt about the pandemic aging them is how I felt after losing my mom. I’m never going to be the same person that I was, just like most people won’t be who they were prior to (gestures vaguely) all of this. For me, one thing that felt so hard about (again, gestures vaguely) all of this, is for a long time I felt like I was existing, not living. The pandemic took away (at least for most of us) the chance to make active choices in our life, something that I had put on hold when my mom was sick and in the year after she died. Once I had finally started to make those choices again, the world shut down. We all suffered through this year+ together - and I am very aware ultimately of how lucky I am - but I think the contrast of briefly feeling like I could live my life again, only to have that agency taken away, was among the things that hit me (personally) the hardest.

I don’t know how my grief will continue to manifest itself in the years to come, but I guess I do know that it will continue to change shape throughout the years, as I continue to shift and the world around us does too.