Thoughts on Grief Three Years Later

Warning: this blog post is not about training. It's quite personal and vulnerable. Do not feel obligated to read on.

On August 10th, 2021, my mother passed away after a long (seven year) battle with cancer. It seems surreal still that she isn't here - it seems impossible that three and a half years have transpired since - and sometimes I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that it all actually happened, and happened the way it did.

Sadly, she isn't here; the time has, in fact, passed; and this is reality.

I included the date, August 10th because her mother also passed away on August 10th. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not. I'm not the most spiritual person but the thought that there was something more cosmic going on at the end has given me comfort.

I want to share a couple of passages at the end of this post that have helped me deal with my grief. My hope is that maybe someone reading this can gain some comfort from them as well.

People ask me how I'm doing from time to time. I still have no idea how to answer that.

Why am I writing this today? I don't know. Her birthday is coming up in a few days? Maybe I want to try to make myself feel better? Honour her? I don't know.

When it comes to grief, I still know nearly nothing other than: it isn't something to get through - but something to learn to live with.

When Mom first told me she had cancer back in August of 2013, I remember vividly how immediately my mind jumped to the sharp, terrifying fears of the potential worst case scenarios. A long, drawn out disease with immense amounts of agony and suffering that took away her dignity? Her actually not winning the battle and then having to live without her long before I ever thought I'd have to?

Hope and love (and naivety that this couldn't possibly happen to us) are powerful deterrents from these fears, but they always lingered in the back of my mind.

Every time the cancer came back, they loomed larger and larger until eventually they were not fears of what could be, but a reality to be lived through and come to terms with.

Tragically, all of those initial fears happened, but even worse. One of the toughest things to deal with is the fact that her disease really went south during COVID. We of course still had hope she could overcome it, and so we stayed away.

As a result, I didn't spend nearly any time with her in the last fifteen months of her life. No bucket list items checked off. Only some visits here and there where we kept our distance.

When she was admitted to the hospital in late May of 2021, she could only have one visitor. It was of course Dad, so we couldn't see her. Her throat hurt so much so we talked on the phone for maybe 30 seconds or a minute.

By the time she was admitted to hospice, she wasn't really able to be present or coherent anymore.

How do I deal with this? I really don't know. A few ways, I suppose:

Ironically, I'm able to in a large part because of her. She passed on her toughness, stubborn-nature, and intensity to me both through genetics and her wisdom.

Gratitude. I got to spend thirty-one years with her. She was the best. Other people lost parents far earlier than me.

And finally: some different pieces of writing have helped me, and I hope could help others too:

First, from Anne of Green Gables:

"Even at Green Gables affairs slipped into their old groove and work was done and duties fulfilled with regularity as before, although always with the aching sense of ‘loss in all familiar things’. Anne, new to grief, thought it almost sad that it could be so – that they could go on in the old way without Matthew. She felt something like shame and remorse when she discovered that the sunrises behind the firs and the pale pink buds opening in the garden gave her the old inrush of gladness when she saw them.

‘It seems like disloyalty to Matthew, to somehow find pleasure in these things now that he has gone. I miss him so much – all the time, and yet the world and life seem very beautiful and interesting to me. I found myself laughing. I thought when it happened I could never laugh again. And it somehow seems as if I oughtn’t to.

‘When Matthew was here he liked to hear you laugh and he liked to know that you found pleasure in the pleasant things around you. He is just away now; and he likes to know it just the same. I am sure we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us.”

Secondly, from this incredibly helpful article: https://www.drpatrickomalley.com/copy-of-disenfranchised-grief

"When I was trained, in the late 1970s, the stages of grief were the standard by which a grieving person’s progress was assessed.

THAT model is still deeply and rigidly embedded in our cultural consciousness and psychological language. It inspires much self-diagnosis and self-criticism among the aggrieved. This is compounded by the often subtle and well-meaning judgment of the surrounding community. A person is to grieve for only so long and with so much intensity.

The long road that begins after the last casserole dish is picked up — when the outside world stops grieving with you. People want to reassure their family, friends and themselves that they are on the fast track to closure. This is exhausting. What they really need is to let themselves sink into their sadness, accept it.

They didn’t really want to achieve closure after all. To do so would be to lose a piece of a sacred bond."

Thank you for reading. I hope if anyone is enduring unbearable grief some of these words helped, even a little.

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