If this is helpful for you, I’m grateful. Reading other’s processing through their suffering is thirst-quenching for my soul these days. So I’ll share some of my personal processing in the hope that it might encourage someone else.

What does life look like now?

In Robert Moll’s book “The Art of Dying”, he includes wisdom from Susan Zonnebelt-Smeenge. First Rob says, “Proper grieving takes time, and taking that time recognizes the importance of the person’s life. When two people…….have intertwined their lives together, it takes time to undo those ties. The grief process acknowledges the depth of the relationship.”

“Any person who loses a loved one needs to recognize, Susan says, “I was attached to this person. I walked through life with this person, and this person has interwoven his or her life with mine. I’m hurting in all the ways that this person was in my life. I have to make some really major adjustments.”

I have a deeper realization that I will continue unpacking, processing and grieving Mom for the rest of my days. This is a snapshot of 17 months after the fact. It is never done. We don’t move on. We continue moving, changed forever by grief. After the first year marker, I struggled under expectations that now all the firsts were over, grief would subside. It would be tamer. I thought I would struggle less and the waves would settle down. At the end of the day, I thought I would hurt less. I desperately wanted (and still do want!) to hurt less. While a lot of this has happened (grief is tamer, and the waves are less violent), I am also experiencing deeper and more painful grief. In many ways, I’m becoming able to hurt more. Part of this is because of the uniqueness of our story (ex: who Mom was to me, our relationship, my age and circumstance when she died, and the insane season of caregiving that preceded her death). The first year for me was full of the firsts, yes. It was also full of unaddressed trauma, executing her will and dealing with her belongings, coming home to grieving children who don’t know what to do and lost their mom as she was, a husband who hung on to single parenting so I could collapse but is also grieving and wounded, learning about grief and trauma, dealing with continuous health issues due to intense caregiving and loss, and more. All of these things are ongoing. It was, and still is, complicated. Layers upon layers. I remember one person’s statement to me at church after her funeral: “At least you’re home now, so life can get back to normal.” I think I smiled and nodded at her, not knowing how to explain that the old normal is gone. Our old normal was buried with Mom. It’s never coming back.

This second year has ushered in the ability to continue grieving with more perspective. The trauma counseling has helped move the trauma so the grief is more free to flow. Craniosacral therapy has been a huge help with this. I had no idea how much grief is held in our bodies. One example is my right lung. A week or so after Mom died, I went down with my first bout of many of fever and congestion. Side note: I think I got sick on average every three weeks for the first six months. After the fever broke, my right lung hung onto a hacking cough. Over a year later, I still have it. After multiple doctor visits, bouts with antibiotics, and x-rays to rule out cancer or other complications, my naturopath explained why right lung congestion is typical and normal for grief, and gave me a way forward to address it. She’s worked with my therapist to help me grieve well. It sounds crazy, as I told my kids the other day, but along with certain supplements, as I learn to welcome the waves of grief and lean into the pain, letting the tears come, my right lung has become more clear.

Some days I just want the pain to stop. It takes so much encouragement for me to keep leaning into the pain. I want it to end. I’m tired of hurting. When I’m “doing well”, it means I’m allowing myself to feel the pain I need to feel in order to grieve. Doing well means feeling pain. Pain I wasn’t able to access in the chaos of the first year. My cranio appointments have been superbly helpful with this. It is one of the few spaces in my life where my grief is welcomed. My therapists understand how much strength it takes to feel this kind of loss. The hard work I do isn’t visible. It’s not attractive. Like I said, I don’t like living with continual pain. But it is incredibly important.

I get why so many of us are terrible companions to the hurting. People quickly become experts at avoiding feeling this way. The TV shows or other distractions are continuously beckoning, signaling “RELIEF” to you. Christians in particular can be experts at using parts of the gospel to avoid grief or attempt to “speed it up” in others. Again, quoting Rob Moll (pg 132), “Mourners can use heaven as an excuse to avoid necessary pain, pretending that the loss of death isn’t real because we will be reunited with our loved ones in heaven. Christians sometimes impose a kind of ban on mourning, using the hope of heaven as an excuse to avoid being confronted with someone else’s pain.” The trouble is, avoidance never delivers healing. When I turn the show off, the pain is waiting for me. Christian positivity isn’t any better. Even though it spouts some truths I do believe about Jesus and life after death, the toxic positivity pushes me both away from grief and away from God. If I ignore grief too long, it grows and affects all areas of my life. It appears the only way out is through the pain.

It’s exhausting to contemplate. I can’t handle more than one day at a time.

Trauma connects to trauma, so unsurprisingly, as I address the trauma moments of caring for Mom and watching her die, older traumas are also rising to the surface. They ask to be addressed. It feels like the reward for pursuing health and recovery is more pain. More fire. You’re obeying God? Great. Here’s more pain. My therapist calls it a gift. Deep down, as much as I fight it, I agree with her. Addressing these wounds is ultimately a great and wonderful thing. It’s one way to take up my cross. The rewards will be worth it. She also has helped me see that I have a choice of how much I address and when. She knows I went through hell before Mom died. She’s listened to my story of what it was like. The trauma is there. It’s waiting for me when I’m ready to look at more.

People are so interesting and messy. Myself included. The most common thing I’ll hear now in regards to my grief is something like, “It’s good to see you smiling again.” Or, “You look great.” Apparently I look better to people. This coincides with a lack of questions about my grief. The unwritten message blares out to me: “We knew you were grieving, and didn’t know what to do with you. Now that you’re smiling more often, you’re obviously fine, and we won’t mention your mom or that horrible season again.” They don’t understand that I’m continuing to grieve, that functioning doesn’t mean I’m fine, or how I need to talk about my mom and the suffering we went through. The only people who ask my how grief is doing now are the ones who showed themselves as helpers at the beginning. My circle of support knows, and asks, and has no timeline on my grief. Everyone else has moved on. While I still ache for this enormously significant part of my life to be acknowledged and seen, I understand better that not everyone is able to. I’m thankful for the small circle of people who do. I am very passionate now about helping others in the same way I have been helped.

The small moments in life I took for granted are now very precious. I do smile and laugh, along with crying and groaning. My time with my kids is precious. Still draining as it ever was, but I see the value of it so much more deeply than I ever have. Joy and sorrow are definitely related. I think of them as fraternal twins. They don’t look alike, but I’m convinced they are joined at the hip until our final tears are washed away. I see it everywhere now: in my own life and in others. I saw it a couple weeks ago watching Robert Irwin’s dedication dance to his mom on DWTS. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it, and watch the preparation of his dance. You see joy and sorrow intermingled. I cannot live now without opening the door to both. I can’t divorce one from the other. Living fully means loving and losing, and I am learning to welcome both, however painful it will be.

I still wrestle with God. Funnily enough, when I “have it out” with him, he and I get closer. Go figure. I have never felt such a sense of welcome from God when I bring him my messy self. It’s so clear he wants me to bring it. All of it. So we wrestle. My prayers are full of cries and questions and anger and “Help me” and naked honesty. I’m learning it’s worship. Vaneetha Rendall Risner agrees. In her book, Walking Through Fire, she shares how lament became her language in the midst of her compounded losses (pg 111), “….my brutal honesty pulled me toward God. And the closer I was drawn, the more my lament transformed into worship–and even trust. Actually, it wasn’t transformed. I learned that lament didn’t need to be transformed–lament itself was an integral part of genuine trust and worship.”

Yes. Amen, sister. Thank you for putting it so well.

There’s more. There’s always more, but that’s a decent snapshot for now. If you followed along, I thank you for listening.