A Year Without My Mother: What Grief Has Taught Me (so far)

My mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. A year later, I am still grieving her and trying to heal.

A week after her death, my dog passed away too. The grief has been tremendous, and I keep wondering what lessons can be learned from grief and from the life and legacy of those who pass on.

You may never get the answers, but you can choose what comes next.

It’s a lot. A rollercoaster of guilt, deep sadness, anger, and forever wrestling with the question of why. Why did this happen, and why did it happen so soon? I've realized I may never truly understand, and I have to make peace with that. It eats at me, but holding onto unresolved questions won't change what happened.

Eventually you have to ask yourself: what am I going to do with the life I still have? I can live miserably, consumed by what I will never understand, or I can honor their memory by choosing to live a life they would be proud of.

Your body grieves too, so you must take care of yourself.

Grief can sneak up on you. You might feel like you have a handle on yourself, but your body decides to betray your mind. I’ve had to deal with anxiety/panic attacks, and dealing with that is terrifying on its own. The way it's manifested in my body has made me question my health. Apparently, a broken heart is actually something you can die from. It’s important to work through your grief and mental health, as unresolved trauma and pain stay in the body and can affect your physical health long after a loss.

Grief can be contradictory, but that’s OK.

The mix of emotions that come up can be ugly, painful, and even comforting. The contrast between one emotion and the comfort of another can feel like whiplash. It’s wild to go from anger and sadness to gratitude for what did happen. Finding gratitude in this time is comforting, even if it feels conflicting.

I’ve had spiritual experiences that have helped me move through my grieving process, but also feel a quiet confidence that despite the loss, I can still feel gratitude and connectedness with my loved ones.

You must be vulnerable.

You need to be okay being vulnerable and relying on your friends and family. It’s a team effort, especially when the person who has passed had such a pivotal role in the family.

Always live as if tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

You aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, so you might as well pursue your dreams. Fear can prevent us from going after our dreams, trying new things, or discovering our purpose here. Although I already had this realization, my mom’s death cemented this. She was 66 years young. Although she did get to enjoy time away from a 9-5 for some time, it puts it in perspective that you may not make it to tomorrow, let alone retirement age.

Years of personal introspection have paid off.

One of the many reasons that I have hope I can get through this tough time is because I figured out my ‘why.’ This used to torment me when I was younger. I felt like I was flailing around, doing what I thought I was supposed to do. Things never felt quite right, like trying to push a square peg into a round hole. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted. At one of my first jobs, my boss asked me what my ‘why’ was. I didn’t understand the question until he explained, “Why do you get up in the morning?”

Essentially, why are you here? What’s your purpose? Some people just intuitively live knowing this, and it’s not a struggle for them. For me, I had to do a lot of inner work to understand and rediscover what I really knew all along.

Heed What They Left Behind

My mother left me lessons and memories that shaped my entire view of life, and for that, I'm deeply grateful. Her mantra in life was “Nothing is impossible.” I can trace my sense of optimism to a mantra ingrained in me from childhood. I can’t remember the exact day my mother said these words to me, but she repeated them so consistently that it became the structural root of my optimistic mind. The bones that hold my somewhat crazy, idealistic thoughts and stern, combative focus together… “Nothing is impossible.”

I remember it printed very clearly in all caps, serif font  on pastel green textured paper.

“NOTHING

IS

IMPOSSIBLE”

She had several of these and taped them to the inside of my school binder, wrote them inside the lid of my pencil box, and then, once again, on a napkin in my lunchbox. She was a confident, bold woman, and she tried to instill that in me.

Nothing is impossible. These three words persistently reminded me every day that if I worked hard enough, put my mind to it, and tried, I could achieve anything. I plan to keep going this way, and through this lesson, I will share her message and her optimism with the world.

Relinquish control and make peace.

Death doesn't make sense; you can spiral from that or take heed of what you do know.

When it's your time, it's your time. You can do everything right, have perfect test results, have things under control, but ultimately the only thing you truly know is that...it will come.

By making peace with death, I will no longer ignore the beauty of it and the effect that my loved ones had on my life, and what I can do to spread that love to those I still have.