It has only been twenty-five days since my mother died. I have not had my primal scream yet, but I already know that it is there, waiting its turn to come out and be heard. It isn’t something I stuff down, afraid of how it will affect me, my family, or the other customers in the grocery store. It isn’t something I fear being unable to handle because of its pure rawness. I am not afraid of this primal emotion that I know will be full of anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, and the pain of feeling lost as an adult. I welcome the instinct that my body has to react to the situations and events that happen to me. That primal scream is a direct result of living with someone who dramatically impacted my life and has left within me a legacy of wisdom and how to love. That primal scream is evidence that my mom lived her life well, and I was one of the lucky people to be nurtured and guided by her.
Loss is governed by various
emotions that show up wildly, stay intermittently, settle in late at night, or
completely elude us. Many people find comfort in understanding the basic
elements of psychology associated with grief and loss. Ticked off, as if on a
list of calculated mind control, people sit and absorb the five stages of loss
into the everyday of their post-lost routines. We tell ourselves that if we
know what’s coming, we can better handle it.
I expect to stay with the
depression stage for some time, occasionally finding my way off its path, only
to be snatched back onto the lane to walk in the darkness some more. I know
from talking to other people who have lost a parent that depression lasts. It
gets better. But it takes a while.
Anger was brief and
showed itself during my mother's fourth day on Comfort Measures Only. The
hospice coordinator who visited me, my aunt, and my mom on the Monday after my
mom left the ICU received the frustration that I felt over floundering through
the weekend without anyone from hospice checking in with us. I dealt him the brunt
of my anger at the Universe for calling my mother’s number.
I didn’t care that “things
take longer to process” over the weekend. I didn’t want to hear about the patient
load or any other patient's acute situation that required the hospice team’s
attention before getting to us.
“I’m not going to take it
out on her,” I said firmly, pointing to my mother “asleep” in her hospital bed.
“I’m not going to take it out on my husband because I have to sleep with him tonight.
I’m not going to take it out on my kids, and I’m not going to take it out on my
aunt.” Again, I pointed, this time to the woman beside me, my mother’s sister,
who had flown in from Arizona to be there for her sister’s last few days of
life.
“So you’re going to get
it. You’re just going to have to suck it up and take it.”
He was gracious with my
directive and silenced his excuses. I then found grace for him, letting the
anger slip away. It was replaced with denial and guilt. As my mother’s proxy, I
would revisit the decision to turn to CMO many times before accepting and
understanding that it was the only resolve for a woman full of energy and excitement
who had been unfairly and swiftly cheated out of her vibrant life by a massive stroke
on the left side of her brain.
I assume bargaining came
at the very beginning while in the car by myself on the way to the hospital. After
getting the text message from my sisters that our mom was once again in the
hospital following a stroke, I began my deluge of out-loud pleas. At the time, I
didn’t recognize the imploring I did in the car for her to “just be OK” and the
scream to her father in heaven that it was too soon, and he couldn’t have her
yet as my way of bargaining for her to survive the tragedy of another stroke.
At that point, I was far from the final stage of acceptance.
There may be five stages
of grief, but there are innumerable ways in which we each experience those stages.
As we morph in and out of any one stage and into another, we find that our
grief is upended by the strongest and wildest of emotions: joy.
The problem with grief is
not understanding when it’s “OK” to feel happy. It hasn’t even been a month,
and my sister struggles and feels guilty when she has a “good” day. She feels
like she is supposed to be feeling poorly all the time and that she dare not
feel any joy when her mother is dead. I also know that she is struggling to
handle the bad days by trying to talk herself into a good day because it sucks
to feel so sad. And then comes guilt again to remind her that she’s being a bad
daughter. Pushing past her bad feelings in search of a good day surely are the
actions of a heartless daughter, are they not? Let sarcasm sing in that sentiment.
I listened to my sister
and wondered why we put our emotions into separate areas of our lives and
assume they always live there. Our wedding day:
happy. Birth of a child: happy.
Fired from a job: angry. Fight with a
friend: sad. Stub your toe on the foot
of the bed: frustration. Sweat through
your dress at a business meeting: embarrassment.
Lose a parent: grief. We assign these
emotions to these events and presume that they will stay within the neat
borders of the occasion. We also assume that no other emotion can be a part of
that occasion, lest we feel guilty for trumping the expected emotion.
Angry on your wedding day
because it was pouring rain? Scared to death at the prospect of actually having
to care for another human being and guide it to adulthood? Relieved when let go
from that job? Not bothered by the fight as much as your friend is? Angry at
your dog for being in the way when you stub your toe? Excited to buy a new
dress because you deserve a new one after that banner meeting? Happy at finding
an Easter egg of love from your mom after she died? Are any of these emotions
wrong in the moment and not allowed because the primary emotion should be
something else?
My therapist once told me,
“To ‘should’ is to shame.” I don’t think there is any emotion we are supposed
to feel at any one time. We may be able to physically express only one emotion
at a time, but that doesn’t mean that other emotions are not an integral part
of the life experiences through which we travel. The mistake is believing that
any one emotion is expected to carry us through the ups and downs of life. As I
have always told my children, “God gave you many emotions, and you have every
right to feel all of them. No one can tell you what to feel or when to feel it.
They are yours alone to experience. You just don’t have a right to express
those emotions however you want.”
Feeling guilty for having
a “good” day or believing it’s wrong even to want a good day is shaming
ourselves into experiencing the sadness we think we are supposed to
feel. The sadness is there. It will always be there. It isn’t being pushed
aside to make way for anything else.
Grief and happiness exist
within the same realm; one does not negate the other. The sadness and joy of
life will forever be intertwined. In some moments, one will be louder than the
other and showier. It isn’t taking the place of the other or, in any way,
saying that the other one doesn’t have a right to be there. They are there as
partners, guiding us forward to the next moment. They share the responsibility of
navigating the terrain of our worlds, one as the pilot and the other as the
copilot. And at any moment, one gives up the wheel and allows the other to drive.
I am still at the very
beginning of this next stage of my life, where I must learn to put one foot in
front of the other without my mom in my life. She is not there for me to call
and ask a cooking question. She isn’t there to answer the trivia question or
swap movie quotes with me. And she will not call or text me on my birthday with
the play-by-play of the birthing events of fifty-six years ago. For the first
time, I will not hear my mother tell me about the errands my dad ran on the way
to the hospital and how she sat on a towel in the front seat of the car after
her water broke. I will not be reminded that she went home from the hospital without
me because I had a touch of infant jaundice and a belly button infection. I
have forever lost the genuine birthday connection of a mother, reliving the
moments when her child came into the world. That grief is something that I cannot
accurately write about at this moment, less than sixty days away from my next birthday.
I do not know the roads that
I will travel to find acceptance. I anticipate that I will claw my way up
simple inclines to find a moment to catch my breath. I am sure that I will find
myself reeling and be unable to stop myself from spiraling into a depression
that no amount of dark chocolate or bourbon will ease. I also know I will laugh
and smile at something that reminds me of her. I will say out loud, “Thank you,
Mom!” when I remember a recipe by heart. I will be grateful for what she gave
to my children in the form of unconditional love and acceptance, even when I,
their mother, struggled to find patience and clarity in parenting them. There
will be profound sadness. There will be hope for lighter days. And there will
be the joyful reminder that I ever had her in my life.
We have a misconception that
we are supposed to be happy and that happiness is the default emotion for
living a well-lived life. We only consider the “negative” emotions of anger,
sadness, guilt, and fear as the occasional feelings we must contend with to
return to happiness. We have wrongfully assumed that the pain of life is meant
to be lived in short spurts, chronicled, and filed away as a memory, not to be
relived. Grief shows us the glaring lie of that assumption and makes way for
the uncomfortable truth that happiness not only must give way to grief for
substantial parts of our lives but that the happiness we feel is only possible because
the grief is so tenable. There would be no “loss” if the happiness had not
grown so large within us because of the person now gone.
Moving forward, it will
be vital for me to remember and remind my sisters that, like all emotions, we
were born with grief. The seed was always there, waiting for the event to bring
it to life. With the loss of our mother, it took root and grew inside. It can’t
be dug out, exterminated, or planted over. Grief joins joy, forever a part of
us, forever a part of our memories. Grief lives with us now.