Cheers to those of you who know that I'm making a play on words with the dorky song that I secretly love: "Life is a Rollercoaster" by Ronan Keating. I don't know, I heard it when I was living in Australia, possibly it wasn't big here?
Sometimes I wish I could go back to 2004 and wear a T-shirt all the time that said "I am allowed to be sad. I am supposed to be sad." That would have been liberating. But instead I partied my way through my mid-twenties like everyone else except I was only having fun on the outside, and I wish I could have communicated that somehow, or understood it better, or known... I don't know, something. I wish I'd asked for help. I wish people had offered it. I wish people had asked more than one time: how are you doing? Okay, obviously it was more than that, but honestly not much more, which is a sad commentary mostly on our society I think, where people have gotten the notion that asking you if you are okay will remind you that you have suffered a horrible loss, which will consequently make you sad. As if you're not walking around all the time being sad anyway and wishing that people would ask so you don't have to be the girl who brings up her dead mother all the time.
Support networks are really important. But you often have to be the one to reach out because people in general (and younger people in particular) are scared of grief. This baffles me, but they all act like it's a communicable disease, like if you ask someone how they are dealing with the loss of their mother then you might die to. Maybe they just subconsciously worry about confronting the fact that their own mothers will eventually die.
We do have a lot of odd ideas about grief in this country, so it's no wonder people don't know how to act. Like the idea that grief is some sort of road trip that ends 1-2 years after you begin. First of all, if you think about how horrible it is to lose someone close to you, how different people are, and how different their relationships with their close friends and family are, then it should be obvious that grief is going to be different for everyone. Yet a bunch of idiots scientists got together a while back and said, yep, it goes like this. Five stages and you're done. I was reading Hope Edelman's book (Motherless Daughters)--I will probably end up citing her a lot given that she sort of is the literature on the topic--and she talks a lot about cycles of grief and how that stages of grief thing (you know, denial, acceptance, anger, whatever) wasn't even about death, it was how people handle bad news or something to that effect. Which death obviously is, but I think it was bad news about themselves, like finding out you yourself are going to die soon, not that someone else just died.
REGARDLESS, the point I'm trying to make is this:
---> You can't run away from grief, you just have to do it and move through it.
The first year is really going to suck. I read somewhere that the first period of intense grieving feels as though you're walking through molasses, which is so true. You feel detached from reality and everything comes to you as though in slow motion.
---> It will get better...
and then it will get worse
and then it will get better
GRIEF IS A DAMN ROLLERCOASTER
Of course it's going to keep happening, it's your MOM for Christ's sake. And even if your mom wasn't all she was cracked up to be according to what society says moms should be, or what you wish she could have been, it's still a huge deal. That never goes away. People don't get this until they're older, so if you're like me, and you were pretty young when you lost your mother, then it is difficult to cope with other people's ignorance because you often feel like you aren't ALLOWED to be sad.
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE SAD. But it will actually get better. Just keep living.
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