What It’s Like to Revisit Grief

For over 25 years of her life, my mom was a client of a group called the Assertive Community Treatment Program, or ACTP. This group is run by our local community mental health department, and they assist disabled adults with a variety of tasks, such as goal-setting, setting up medical care, providing therapy and community involvement opportunities and so much more. I am forever grateful for all they did to give my mom a safe place to land for all those years. Since her funeral almost a year ago, I have had a monetary memorial gift for ACTP, to be made in my mom’s honor, shoved in an envelope in the middle console of my car. I know that might sound lazy or horrible, but well, it’s my truth.

After the funeral, I told myself I would bring it to the ACTP office the following week, while I was still off of work.

I didn’t.

After that, I promised myself I would deliver it by the time summer break came around. Teachers’ lives revolve around the school calendar, you know, so that was my next goal. I didn’t.

Oh, I thought about it a lot. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I’d do it over the summer, surely.

I didn’t.

Not by any of my next markers either. I didn’t deliver it by her birthday, September 6, or on Christmas break.

It wasn’t laziness, lack of respect or responsibility or procrastination that stopped me: it was just pure grief. Too many memories down that street, I guess. On the very same road as the ACTP office also sat the apartment complex where Mom had lived for almost a decade, where she made friends with neighbors and tasted her last morsels of independent living, and also the nursing home where she spent her last year and took her last breath. Passing all of those places might hurt too much. Instead, I avoided the task like the plague.

But this week, I did it. On Sunday, the 17th, it will be one year since she passed, and I could not let that milestone pass by, too. Sadly, ironically, on the 17th this year I will attend the funeral of another woman who meant a great deal to me and to my family. It’s just another reminder that our time here is finite, and we should go ahead and do the things we intend to do. So, I delivered the memorial gift. I talked to mom’s case worker of nearly 30 years. I heard a few stories about her I had never heard before. I cried. I talked to a social worker who said mom was the first client he had ever dealt with upon being hired and that she whipped him into shape awfully quick. I was told again that Mom was so proud of all of us. It was hard to walk in there, but it would have been harder to keep driving around with that damn envelope in the console for another year. I had forgotten I’d also stuffed all the little cards from the floral arrangements in there too. I re-read every one.

I was talking to a friend of mine earlier this year about grief. Her mom had recently passed away, and with sad eyes she asked something along the lines of, “How long is this supposed to take?”

This, meaning grief.

I guess my answer is, it will last forever but in different forms. It doesn’t always mean sadness and tears. It isn’t always a severe throbbing but sometimes just a minor irritation, like you know something uncomfortable is there, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Grief can be the bittersweet feeling of a new musical coming out and knowing Mom won’t get to see it. It can be enjoying it on her behalf. It doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. I’m reminded of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 1, 2, and 4. It tells us, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” And I think that really, those seasons can intermix quite frequently, because although I’ve done a lot of grieving over the past year, I’ve also done a lot of good living. I’ve seen plenty of places, read plenty of books, listened to plenty of music. I’ve come to realize that one of the best ways we can honor the people we miss is to live our own lives with intention. So grief isn’t all bad, because it’s a testament to a relationship, to love, to your emotional growth. We know it can be sad, too. It can be big fat tears falling down your cheeks as you pull into and out of the parking lot of a place that gave your mother hope, consistency and friendship for several decades.

But friends, because I know all of you have walked, are walking or will walk through the muddy waters of grief at some point, please know this — it has no set timeline. Sure, there are stages, but the speed of it is different for everyone. However you feel is very likely normal. And if you’re in the trenches right now, my heart is aching for you because I know how hard it is. It will not always hurt quite as bad, but it will never completely go away. And that’s OK, because in a contradictory sort of way, you don’t really want it to.

Follow this journey on the author’s blog.