What is grief?

What is grief?

Monday, May 20, 2013 marks the 5^th anniversary of the passing of my mother.  Despite the passage of time, I, at moments, feel this loss as devastatingly painfully as I did when it happened at 12:30am in my, then, parents’ house.  As soon as my mother died and her spirit left, it was undeniably my father’s house.  I’d never understood how her spirit filled that home with energy until I felt the absence of it.

Absence.  It is how I experience my mother now.  When I want to pick up the phone and tell her something, I can’t.  She is absent.  When I get emotional at weddings because one day I want to get married and my mother won’t be there to share that with me, I am sad.  She is absent.  When I am curious about what is the inevitable transition of my hormonal state from fertile to barren, I cannot ask her what it was like for her.  She is absent.  When I am beyond overwhelmed with dealing with my father, I can’t ask her how she, good God, dealt with it.  She is absent.

Every year around this time I cry myself to sleep.  TMI?  Oh well… I don’t give a shit.  Well, a shit about things that don't really matter.  That's an interesting by-product of grief.  The death of my mother catapulted me to a new reality that I couldn’t have understood existed until I woke up there.

So, what is grief?  Do I need grief counseling?  Probably not.  What would I do?  Talk about how much I miss my mom?  How much it hurts?  How much I still feel lost and helpless and want to on occasion curl up in a little ball and feel sorry for myself?  Those feelings are never going to change.  I don't need to spend $100 an hour to talk about them.  In fact, it might not even help if you read Psychology Today.

I will say that I’ve changed.  I feel pain like I’ve never known but I also feel empowered.  Albeit in almost a brutal way.  I've learned how to "let go" in a way.  If you need someone to help you kill an animal, your pet, a mouse, I don't know.... because you want to put it out of its misery, I’ll help you with that.   If you need me to help you throw away the entire contents of a space that is full of crap that no longer serves you but burdens you, I’ll help you with that.  If you need to sob hysterically for hours until the storm passes in your heart, I’ll help you with that.

What is grief?  To me, grief is being permanently plugged into what it means to cherish the precious little time we have on this planet and the precious little time we have with the people we love.  And grief gives me the strength to make hard decisions.  Because emotionally surviving the death of my mother didn’t only happen on May 20, 2008 when she died.  It happens to me on a daily basis.

That is grief.