A.B. Lee Writes

So, your mom died.

Maybe you’ve reached the part of mourning where you find yourself googling the ways to deal with grief. They’ll tell you that they’re all steps, one following after the other.

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

But if you’ve actually lost someone, you probably know that it doesn’t work that way for most people. Grief, in my experience, is a conglomeration of one or more (or all) of these things. I felt every one of the listed emotions, but never one at a time, and never in order.

Anger is a phase of the grieving “process” that I find myself coming back to over and over again. Anger at myself, the people around me, even at my mother.

Maybe you’re teetering between two, or like me, you jump all around on the scale. Maybe you’ve gone through all the stages like a real pro. I don’t know.

Maybe you haven’t lost your mom, but someone you love did, and you want to do something to help.

If any of those are true, you should know something: losing your mom sucks. There isn’t any other way to say it. I lost my mom in November of 2018. The anger, denial, depression– its all still there; it just changes day to day.

The pain doesn’t go away

I’ve heard a thousand times that the pain and hurt of losing my mother and best friend would fade.

You’ll learn to move on…

and

The pain will go away over time.

When people would tell me this, I would become almost frantic. The thought of forgetting about her and losing the pain of her death made me feel hopeless. Would I really just wake up one day and not feel the hole in my chest that her death left behind?

What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t true at all. The truth was that grief changes over time. It never goes away. It never becomes less or dulls. It is always there. All it takes is a memory of singing the Avett Brothers at the top of our lungs in the car, or an image of her smiling at the camera, or someone walking past me in the mall wearing Daisy by Marc Jacobs to make me relive the devastation.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t want it to ever go away. If I lose the pain, I lose my mom, and I’m just not ready to let go forever. I’m not always a puddle of tears on the floor, but I allow myself to be every now and again. I’ve learned how to let it exist.

Let your grief be your own

Dark humor was one of the many traits my siblings and I inherited from our mother. Sometimes, even when things are shit and you want nothing more than to make everything different, cracking a joke is the only way to relieve some of the tension.

Maybe that isn’t how everyone operates, but when you’re in the thick of it, unsure of everything you were so sure of a short time ago, you have to cope how you cope.

I remember cracking a rather crude joke about her death to my best friend shortly after my mother’s death, which she did not take well. It was something along the lines of, don’t be mad at me, my mom died. I guess the joke caught her off guard; perhaps it made her sad. I can’t really say for sure.

I remember feeling terrible that I made a joke–I even had to comfort her, but then it hit me that I shouldn’t have to feel bad. I shouldn’t apologize for dealing with my grief the way I choose to deal with it. Don’t let anyone tell you how to process the tragedies you experience. Everyone’s grief is different.

Prepare for how quickly other people will let them go

You might find that some people in your life can’t handle your grief. In my experience, people don’t know what to do with mourning. They slap a quick “I’m sorry for your loss” and keep trucking. I can’t be angry about that. It’s tricky, because honestly, what do you say to someone who’s mom, dad, sibling, or child died? Actually, I can be angry about that; its the step I’m constantly hung up on, remember?

You tell them something you loved about the person who died. You give them the gift of knowing that person will never truly cease to exist because you’re going to think about them.

Everyone is going to reach out in the beginning, but if someone you know has lost a person they love, be there in the weeks, months, and years to come. Help them keep that person’s memory alive.

It’s grossly simple, really. You might not know exactly what they’re going through, the truth is that no matter if you have lost someone, loss is different for everyone, so their loss will be different from yours in some way. Just let them live in it; let it consume them for a while, and then be there to help them remember the person they loved.

I don’t know if what I’ve written here will resonate with anyone. Maybe in a way, I don’t really care because even now, almost 6 years later, I still have to find my way to let out my grief. I can talk about it and post some pictures of my mama’s beautiful face for people to see, maybe even for some people to remember. And maybe it’ll help ease the anger for a little while. Either way, I got to share some of the love I feel for my mom today, and that’s never a bad day.