Griefaries: One

I often find myself asking my friends or family if they can really believe that my mom's gone.  As if they are even remotely close to feeling any way that I feel regarding the topic.  Obviously every life she's touched knows grief now, I'm not denying that, but there is a different level to my grief than to yours.  So if I wake up every day still in complete disbelief that my own mother died, how can you not be also?

I have to say, most days I feel quite bad for all of you that stick around and support us grievers.  Sometimes I honestly think that you feel everything we do even more than us.  That is, if you're a griever like me, anyway.  My head knows that my mom died, but my heart or my soul, that little naive piece of me that I have yet to kill in myself, still cannot wrap her head around it.  So I live very much in the middle - I completely understand the concept of death, and yet I cannot believe that she's dead.

So I say that I think you feel everything that we do even more than us, because I genuinely believe that you may.  You just have the outsiders perspective, not contaminated by a grievers delirium or legally blind hope.  You have the facts of the death itself, and the fact of this death your griever is grieving.  And you feel that sadness, all of it, as well as every sad story your griever is destined to share on their journey.

My friend Emily is a saint.  I think she carries my grief, her own grief for me, and my entire self through this very dark and unpaved path in my life.  I believe that she stands on the very shaky foundation of my questionable emotional state of every day, and has yet to drop a single bag I've handed to her.  They're very heavy, my bags.  They're full of things I don't dare say aloud, and my deepest fears, and my most haunting dreams.  They're full of terrible imagery and sad memories and happy memories that by default just make me sad, because in grief what is happiness other than something so fragile you dare not even remove it from its case?  In fact, you bubble wrap it, and store it away with other fragile things to collect dust.  It's safer there than in my heart, that happiness.  It cannot be touched ever again if it is not seen.

I was just looking through a Bed Bath & Beyond magazine, and some items were holiday themed.  They just reminded me of the season ahead - a third without Aunt Diane, a second without Mom, and the first without Grandma.  Grandma, a loss I have yet to even write about.  I think, if I'm honest, that's just because it would be as simple as copying and pasting anything I had previously written about her fallen daughters.  Life without these women is a life I genuinely never imagined living, especially within in the span of less than 2 years.  Yet here I am, doing some form of living or surviving, or merely existing, I'm not sure.

As I sat and looked at that magazine tonight, I couldn't help but listen carefully to the sound of our house.  There was no spoon scraping the side of a pan from mom's late night cooking, no late night show playing on the TV, there was no voice of my mother next to me on the couch.  There was no sight of her anywhere.  I don't feel her here.  Sometimes it's hard to believe she ever was here.

Nights like tonight are difficult for me to maneuver, emotionally.  When thoughts like this come, I can't help but get sad.  Then the thoughts spiral out of control - she's gone, I actually can't believe it.  She used to be here, but now she's gone.  I can see her right there, oh no never mind - Now where I see her is a casket.  I see her under the grass and dirt of the earth.  I see her laying there, looking so much like herself and yet so different.  I can't believe she's not here.  Sometimes all I really want to do is run away.  Sell this house, leave this town, go so far away that I don't recognize a street name or a face, and breathe.  Most of the time, though, I can't fathom leaving this house.  I can't imagine it not being apart of our lives, apart of our futures.  I'm not sure that it will be, honestly.  No one can even say what tomorrow will bring.  But in my heart, my children were going to come back here to see grandma some day, but that dream died with my mother.

Maybe this house will end up someone else's before either of the 3 of us is gone, and that day will be hard, but no harder than the rest.

See what my dear Emily has to deal with?  This grief brain is not for everybody.  Please know, if in my grief we have drifted apart, I completely understand.  I'm really not even that close with myself most days.  I'm still trying to figure out who I am as a motherless 20-something with no idea how to do things, and even less desire to figure them out on her own.

If you take the time to read these personal diaries of mine, thank you.  I really wish you well in this journey called life.  As the great Harry Styles says, treat people with kindness.  And as a wonderful former teacher of mine always said (MLB, I'm looking at you), be kind, be safe, and make good choices.

<3 Sarah