IYKYK: Dead Mom Problems

I'm sorry, is my never-ending grief making you uncomfortable?

It’s come to my attention over and over and over again since the death of my mom in 2021, that people really just have no time or patience for grief…until it is their own.

More so, they have no intimate understanding of it and it’s exhausting to have to explain grief, its physical and emotional makeup, the ups and downs of a normal Tuesday…the random pangs of hopelessness that strike out of a blue clear sky. The truth is…I didn’t understand it until it became an uninvited guest to my own party. The painful (and maybe beautiful) truth is that death and grief are two things impossible to grasp with human understanding until we are living it.

In the immediate aftermath of Mom dropping dead, rather suddenly at that, some friends ran for the hills while others fumbled around with trying to find appropriate words of condolence or strength. I got a lot of thoughts and prayers and pretty flowers delivered to my house. I lost some friends completely, cutting them off after feeling abandoned in the middle of the worst time of my life. Some admitted they had no idea what to say while others swore they could empathize because their grandma or ex-lover or childhood neighbor had died at some point in the past and it is obviously all the same. I had lost my mama, the only one whose hugs felt like home. It didn’t feel like it was the same. Most meant well but most fell short of offering what I really needed.

I had a relatively new friend at the time, Andi Marie, who for some reason my intuition (maybe Mom) was urging me to reach out to. We hadn’t spent much time together beyond a couple of coffee date chats and a podcast interview about sobriety. She had no idea that I’d spent the last two weeks saying goodbye to and burying my fifty-nine year old mother in my hometown over in East Tennessee. I decided to reach out and told her I needed a friend, “Can I stop by your house?” Bless her heart.

I showed up, disheveled and desperate, and as she was making me a coffee she asked, sincerely, “What’s goin on, sis?”

“I’m about to lay something really heavy on you, I’m sorry,” I apologized for my grief before presenting it to this woman who hardly knew me in her kitchen. “My mom died.” I watched her face shift from commonplace concern to existential heartbreak as tears pooled up in her wide eyes. I could actually hear the breath leaving her lungs and her heart plummet into her stomach. She hugged me and motioned me over to the couch. Andi didn’t beat around the bush or shy away from the hard questions. She asked how she died. She asked about the process of picking out her casket and choosing the flowers. She cried and looked me dead in the soul. She listened to me talk about how confusing it was to be “dead mom girl” now and how spiritual the experience had felt to me. I told her about the weird signs I was seeing and the hundreds of near death experience videos I had watched over the past few days. I half expected her to suggest that I check myself into a psych ward, but she didn’t. She just kept asking questions and stayed right there in it with me. It was exactly what I needed, exactly why I’d gone there that day. She would become one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

It’s been over three years since that afternoon at Andi’s house and I’ve managed to survive. Some of the friends that fell away in those early days have come back around, the grudges I was sure I’d hold forever have fallen away now. Some friendships have been rearranged and prioritized differently, old lovers who didn’t show finally crossed off the list for good. My conversations have moved on, I no longer talk exclusively about death and the afterlife…do talk about them a lot though. Still, I am forever changed.

No one really talks about the years that follow that breaking. We read about the rawness of immediate grief, the anguish of looking at the door willing them to walk back in, unscathed and laughing. We bring food to grieving neighbors’ homes for six months after a person who lived there dies. We call to check in with dear friends who’ve lost someone close to them in the weeks and months that follow the burial. Then we move on. They all move on.

We start to hide how deeply it still affects us, fearful of someone saying behind our backs that it’s time to let go and stop victimizing ourselves. We gather up all the tiny moments that crush us each day and put them tidily into a box where they won’t bother anyone. We save our outbursts and weeping fits for solo drives and bathroom breaks. I don’t tell the person I’m at lunch with that I didn’t hear the last five minutes of their story because I saw a tall woman with black curly hair twist her mouth into a “Vicki-coded” smile and completely blacked out. When my partner asks what’s on my mind I assure him that, “I’m just stressed about all the work stuff I have going on and I’m feeling anxious,” instead of telling him that I was lost in a brain loop featuring Mom’s final moments and remembering how quickly her skin turned cold. This happens all the time, unwelcome replays of the worst day of my life.

Is it not polite to bring up gut wrenching scenes from our past? Is it uncomfortable for the people in our lives to have to imagine us in real pain? Are we supposed to shield them from it? No one shielded us.

Andi Marie still asks me to this day at least every other time I see her, “How’s the mom stuff?” It means everything to me. She’s never gotten sick of my answer, at least she’s never made me feel like she has.

Losing Mom made me an overly proactive grief-supporting-witness-of-a-friend. Someone’s dead? I’m on my way. Let me look at you. Let me watch you survive this. We all need witnesses. We all need someone to hold the proof that we didn’t get sucked into the black hole when it’s all we wanted.

When my mom died it felt like I was suddenly untethered, nothing holding me to the earth any longer-like I might just flail around and eventually float away to wherever she had gone to. The only sense of home and safety and unconditional love that I’d ever known was just gone. I didn’t know how I was supposed to live more than half a life without it. Our mothers are our entrance to the world, our first scent, our first happy face, our first breath and kiss and sound. The pain of watching that leave us is something I wish on no one but know comes for everyone.

My grief has been a blessing as much as it’s been a burden. I’m spiritual. I know Mom is A-OK. I feel her everywhere, she’s here now in this cafe in San Francisco where a poinsettia plant, out of place for mid-February, sits atop a piano. The red leaves elicit my final image of her, early December, late evening on the fourth day. I’d plucked three red petals from the one we’d placed in her hospital room because it was almost Christmas and she loved them. I placed the petals in a circle on her chest, one for each of her daughters. As I turned to take one last look at the woman who gave me life and every ounce of love she could muster, I couldn’t help but think how beautiful she looked. A valiant warrior queen, resting after the battle, awaiting her turn to see the King.

Your grief is not an inconvenience. It is part of you, sewn into the fabric of your existence until the end of time and maybe then some. I pray that you have the bravery and the good friends to keep it alive.

Love you forever, Mommy.