June 10th, 2020 — On Two Years Since Losing My Mom
June 10, 2020
I wish I had written something down on this day last year. And honestly, maybe I did but I’ve lost it or don’t remember it. What a gift it could be to write something down every year on this day, a record of where and what I am feeling and experiencing. I didn’t though, and I think that says something too. I was too in it. Too caught in not knowing what or how to feel and not having the experience of learning how to sit with my grief, at its quietest and its loudest.
Last year, I went to the lake, I sat and I painted all day (what a world that was where I could just “go to the lake”). I turned my phone off from the moment I woke up because I was terrified at who might text me and the anger that would well at the assumed performativity of their attempts to comfort. And when I turned my phone on at the end of the night and 12 hours of messages all came in at once, I can guarantee that was worse than sitting with them as they came.
I haven’t turned my phone off today — for a host of reasons I don’t feel as though I owe to anyone — but have still found time to carve out for myself. I have made it my goal to put joy back into the world where I can on a day that would otherwise be far too sad and unbearable for a lot of people. I am also grateful for an amazing group of friends who took the time to make sure that was also done for me today. To make sure that there was joy and understanding and acknowledgement without any expectation of a response. I often focus so diligently on creating that space for other people that I forget to attend to my own joy.
Two years since losing my mom, it is hard to feel as though I have anything new or meaningful to say. Or to think that it has much value, especially at a time like right now. I think about how grateful and lucky and privileged I am to have had my mom, such an amazing and beyond-words woman, in my life for as long as I did. I think about the people who have been taken from this world far sooner, and with even less reason and more preventability than my mom. George Floyd was 46, and he too has a daughter left in this world without a parent.
I currently finished “Practicing Peace in Times a War,” a book recommended and lent by a friend who couldn’t have possibly known how much it was needed. It speaks about cultivating “unconditional friendliness” towards ourselves. About reaching behind our fear to touch the soft spot that’s hiding — how when we touch this place, really we’re touching the “vast, blue sky.” It also speaks about this idea of “compassionate abiding,” of sitting with our aversion, our pain, and our discomfort. Breathing it in and making space for it, and relaxing as we breathe it out.
I am no expert at peace, and quite frankly have been mostly just angry for two years. I have exhausted a lot of effort to hide that soft spot and that vast blue sky, from others and myself. I am not perfect at “assuming good will” and have been the first to say to my counselor at least once a month, “I wish people would leave me the fuck alone.” In truth, I am grateful they haven’t.
I am grateful that I have a cast of mothers who check in on me. I am grateful I have a group of friends who have let me be angry and tired and sad. I am grateful to the wonderful directors and cast of this year’s Vagina Monologues, who held space for me to talk about my mom, as well as to talk about hospice and loss. I am grateful to have a counselor who patiently waited (and not just because I pay her) while I circled in closer and closer towards the heart of my grief and the moments I was willing to hold that expanse of sky behind it. I am grateful to my partner for all the love he has cultivated and shared with me from the moment we met (or at least the moment I said, “You’re going to date me.”) I am grateful to have a family who misses her as much as me.
By no means have I perfected the act of sitting with my grief, but I do like to think I am somewhat better at it than I was even just a year ago (or a month, a week, a day ago). We’re by no means “friends,” my grief and I, but we are bound together through inexplicable loss that it only makes sense that we make at least a little peace with one another.
That vast, blue sky that hides behind my fear hides behind all our fear. Our fear of loss, and change, of shame, of ignorance, of complicit- and complacency, of a world being exposed that maybe looks different than the one we thought we lived in. And that’s okay. Sitting with our grief, as a part of our whole selves, is an act of resistance. Because that vast blue sky is a hopeful one.
