LESSONS FROM GRIEF

What Losing My Mom Has Taught Me (So Far)

Back in May, I interviewed author Cody Delistraty on my podcast Just Between Us. He’d recently written a book all about grief that was inspired by losing his mom years earlier. During our conversation I shared that while I’d been through a lot in my life (mental illness, major surgeries, failure, heartbreaks), the one area I had no experience with was grief. At least grief because the person had died rather than cut me out of their still-happening life. All those other hardships had fundamentally changed me as a person, and I was somewhat morbidly curious how I would respond to the kind of soul-wrenching grief people write entire memoirs about. I suspected I would not handle it well.

Less than five months later, I had my answer. It turns out that I did astonishingly well in the immediate aftermath. I managed to put together my mother’s funeral service and write her obituary in the 48 hours after she died in her home surrounded by loved ones. I remained composed and present and didn’t feel compelled to slit my wrists and join her (a reaction I had anticipated given the closeness of our relationship and my history of suicidal ideation). Those first few weeks without her were spent taking care of my dad and promoting my new book. I only had the time and space to confront my own grief once I returned to Los Angeles and attempted to resume a new, significantly worse, version of my daily life.

Since then, I’ve started to notice changes in how I view the world. It’s the kind of mental shifts that only come after going through something awful. During The Daily’s recent retrospective episode, The Year In Wisdom, one of the journalists interviewed shared a sentiment that stuck out to me. He said something to the effect of, you can focus on the pain or you can focus on the lesson. Seeing as my mother was a life-long learner, I am doing my best to make the most of this grief. To use it as a way to fuel a better understanding of what it means to be mortal and human. This doesn’t erase the pain or even ease it, but it does help make it less senseless.

So with all that in mind, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

THE GREATEST WAY I CAN HONOR MY MOM IS TO BE HAPPY

The thing my mom wanted most in the world was for her children and grandchildren to be happy. I am the only person who can give her that. (At least regarding myself.) As much as this loss had made me want to disengage from the world and give into negativity, doing that would ruin her legacy. Deciding to live for both of us has helped motivate me to continue to find joy. It also makes me feel less guilty for not being completely consumed by grief all the time. Being able to enjoy my life without her isn’t a betrayal of my love, it is a testament to how she raised me.

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE TO SURVIVE

A few weeks ago my dad told me he drank his first glass of wine. He was out to eat with the woman he was dating and another couple and decided to try it. My initial reaction was one of annoyance. Why was my picky father willing to push his taste buds for some woman he barely knew after decades of not drinking with my mom–who would occasionally enjoy a glass by herself or with my husband? I quickly realized that deciding to finally have that glass of wine likely had little to do with his date. Rather, it can be comforting to transform in the wake of grief because this new version of you is learning how to live without them. If we don’t try new things and forge new relationships, the life we lead will simply be less full than before, and it will be harder to engage in the present. Changing, even in superficial ways, helps us stay attached to our new reality instead of being completely stuck in the past.

THERE WILL BE FORTUNE IN YOUR MISFORTUNE IF YOU LOOK HARD ENOUGH

It would be easy for me to solely focus on all the things that went wrong. My mother died extremely quickly from an incredibly rare disease. I didn’t get to ask her all the questions I wanted to because she lost her ability to speak. She will never get the chance to meet my future child if I am lucky enough to have one. And plenty of other ridiculous (horrible) things happened during the course of her rapid decline including the elevator breaking (leaving her trapped on the second floor of my parent’s house) and the air conditioning malfunctioning during a very hot shiva.

But despite the various mishaps that ranged from annoying to truly traumatic, I find myself returning more to the solace that came from her disease being completely untreatable. Once we got the CJD diagnosis, there was nothing to do. There was no medicine or cutting edge technologies to try out. We didn’t waste time taking her to various doctors and we don’t waste mental energy now wondering if only we had done something different. There was a definiteness to her condition that allowed us to be present with her rather than racing against the clock to find a cure. If I was going to have to lose her, I’m glad I got to spend the last weeks we had together accepting that rather than fighting it.

I never thought there would be comfort in a terminal disease. But I also never experienced anything like this before.

DEATH WON’T ENLIGHTEN YOU

For all that I’ve learned since September 23rd, perhaps the hardest to swallow is that I am still a petty, jealous, imperfect person. You think that losing someone so important will completely transform the way you see and interact with the world. I assumed I would stop caring about the success of my books or my engagement on Instagram. I thought that in exchange for my mother I’d get to reach some higher level of understanding about life that would elevate me beyond my worst instincts. Nope. While I am certainly changed–and in many ways for the better–I am nowhere within reaching distance of Nirvana. Instead, I find myself having to figure out how to go on living as a regular, flawed person with a mom-shaped hole in my heart.

JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE IS GONE DOESN’T MEAN THEY WON’T CONTINUE TO SHAPE YOU

My mom keeps teaching me things even though I can’t talk to her anymore. I often wonder how my mom would want me to handle something, and I’ve looked for guidance in her own experiences with grief and losing so many members of her family as I navigate my own. I’m relieved to realize that my relationship with my mother will be ongoing. My mother might not be alive, but I am not and never will be motherless.

I CAN HANDLE MORE THAN I THINK I CAN AND SO CAN OTHER PEOPLE

Most of us are walking around with major wounds of some sort. If we told our worst stories to others they would say, I can’t imagine or I don’t know how you deal with that. And yet…here we are. Grief and trauma might weigh us down. But we can often carry more than we think. Especially when we let others bear some of the load.

After years of wondering, I now know how I handle grief. And while it is extremely painful, it makes the rest of the unknowns in my life less scary. Because I have already lived through my worst fear coming true.

xoxo,

Allison

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