My mom passed away unexpectedly a few months ago and I’m still struggling with the grief process. I know that grief is not a linear process, yet for some dumb reason, I expected things to slowly get better without sliding back into the heavy and dark emotions of those initial days and weeks. And for a while, I did slowly get better and each week was a little less hard than the week before.
Yet here I am, caught off guard and unprepared to find that I have backpedaled. I think about her every day and I’m back to crying regularly. I miss her and it surfaces sometimes in the most unexpected ways, often catching me off guard.
It’s like there’s a disconnect between knowing that I can’t talk to her or see her ever again versus feeling it, if that makes sense. My emotional brain is not in sync with my intellectual/logical brain.
I’ve been thinking of it kind of like motion sickness where the eye perceives things differently than the rest of the body and this creates a sense of disorientation and disequilibrium that is so strong that it can make a person physically ill.
This is close to the feeling I get every time I think “Oh, I need to call Mom to see how she’s doing today” or when the phone rings and I think it’s her calling me. Or when things happen in my life that I just want to talk to her about and it hits me again – this knowledge, this ugly fact – that I can’t call her, that I can’t talk to her about my day, that I can’t ask for her advice or opinions.
I feel untethered, set adrift, lacking some essential rudder that I didn’t realize I still needed at my age and stage in life.
And much like a wave of motion sickness, grief sweeps over me and overwhelms me in its intensity. It leaves me almost shocked and gasping as I re-absorb the fact that she is gone. Over and over and over. Every day, often multiple times a day. I’m sitting here crying as I write this.
I know eventually things will get better but I also have a level of dread that I will feel this void in my life forever. I suppose in a way that’s a good thing. It’s a sign of a life well-lived to have people miss you when you’re gone.
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