I think about my mum almost every day and at the same time I haven’t really been thinking about her at all. Maybe I thought I was, but now I really am thinking about her it makes whatever else I was doing seem surface-level.
Life has been busy, changing, good even. But the one thing in life that never changes is death.
I started the year feeling like I was in a really good place with my grief. I’d traded torturing myself with mum-related ‘what ifs’ to tickling my brain with mum-related whimsy.
“It’s not that it doesn’t still rip my heart out to know that my mum’s dead and not only that but she chose to be, it’s not that I don’t carry the weight of the grief and the guilt left behind, but I’ve actively tried to channel what I call ‘good grief’. I’ve been remembering the good times. Thinking of the things she’d say and the jokes she’d make. Basking in the warm memories and using them to keep her present in my life. I can’t do anything about what’s happened and I got to a point where going over it all the time just seemed pointless. I didn’t want the memory of her to be always so full of pain like she was. The mum in my head that makes a witty remark whenever someone says something stupid is a far lighter way to carry her with me through the rest of my life. Of course there are days where my grief is not all light and fluffy and the guilt melts my insides like water on cotton candy, but that doesn’t mean every day has to be like that. Leaning into the joy she gave me has made me has made me feel far closer to her than anything else. It doesn’t mean I forget the bad, I just leave it to find me rather than go looking for it myself.” – Me in January
Yet recently I have found myself sinking into a pit of my own despair more and more often. Usually it’s like an aching from my stomach or an itch in my chest, but today I actually cried. Sobbed. Soaked my face in salted aches.
It feels like it’s all caught up with me. The overwhelm makes me feel like a bunch of knotted earphones and no matter what bits I tug I can’t get things straightened out. If grief is an entanglement of wired headphones then writing for me is like starting from the connector and working my way through the mess.
A few months ago I started to by starting this post, but untangling grief is much like untangling headphones in that it’s a tedious and easily abandoned task. Sometimes you feel like you’re taking the right steps but things don’t look any less of a mess than when you started, but you often have to trust the process and stick with it if you want to see results.
It’s been almost three years since my mum took her own life. It feels criminal that time keeps passing without taking her with it. I try and take her with it, but each year feels like their is less substance, less to grasp onto. Like her memory is losing its love handles even if it’s not losing weight.
It hasn’t stopped me thinking about her, but I think it’s changed the way I think about her. It’s probably not just time passing that has changed that, but life happening too.
My life has changed a lot in the last year. I got in a new relationship and I started working again. Both have been really positive things, but it’s stretched my capacity more than its been used to. I’ve felt guilty for not being sad enough and not having the time to dwell in it. There have been a few times I have, but generally I’ve avoided my grief more than I like to admit both indirectly by being busier and directly because I’m scared of falling apart when I need to be getting shit done.
Earlier this year one of my friends lost a parent. I hadn’t seen this friend since before my mum died, but distance has never weakened our friendship. They invited me to the funeral. I really wanted to go and support them. I knew I should go and support them, but I hadn’t been to a funeral since my mum’s. At first I thought I didn’t want to go because I’m a bad person or because it almost made no sense to go to support my friend when they would be too busy to benefit anyway (even though I know looking back that the effort says a lot more than I ever could). It was only at 4am the night before that I realised everything I was envisioning (in my little autistic plan of how to act) was based on my mum’s funeral. When I thought about the ceremony, the flowers, even the wake. Maybe that’s normal. It was the last funeral I’d been to after all, but it still felt fresh. It isn’t though, and it stung a little more when I remembered that was over two years ago (at the time- it’s coming up to three now)
I did go in the end and stayed much longer than I thought I would. It wasn’t as difficult as I predicted and I was really glad I went. It was good to see and support my friend and good to get another funeral under my belt so to speak. I know for me knowing other people in my network with dead parents has made me feel less alone (even when they don’t have the complication of suicide) whether we actively talk about it or not, and it brings me some comfort to feel I could provide that comfort to someone else. It’s one of those things you can’t ever understand until you’ve been through it (no matter how hard you try or how well-meaning your attempts to are). It feels similar to the mutual understanding I sometimes feel with particular types of trauma survivors (and I guess that makes sense because I recon losing a parent is usually traumatic in some way – even in the best circumstances)
My boyfriend moved in around the same time. That has been a big change – both the boyfriend and the moving in. I’d lived alone in my flat for almost 10 years, but he moved in before I completed the decade. In making space for him, I am having to let go of things I was previously able to needlessly keep. I think needlessly keep feels more appropriate than hoard for most things. There are definitely things I hoard, but there is far more I needlessly keep. There are clothes my mum bought me that have been sitting in my wardrobe unworn with the tags still on for years. There are clothes my mum bought me sitting in my wardrobe that are far too small for me now but feel intrinsically tied to a time and place in life and in my relationship with my mum in a way that feels hard to let go of. Then there are clothes my mum bought me sitting in my wardrobe that have been worn to death and are far too worn to be worn anywhere else now but that love for something she got me feels too precious to pass up.
Or rather, there were. I guess while I abandoned my first attempt to clear out my head with words, I didn’t abandon my attempt to clear out my clutter. I didn’t completely get rid of everything, but moving things out my wardrobe felt like a big step. Time passing and being more precious has made me realise that I can’t hold onto everything forever. It’s better to have loved and to have lost cute jeans my mum got me than it is to have never loved cute jeans at all, and at the end of the day are cute jeans really what I want to remember my mum by?
Needing to create space for a new life forced me to question my reason for keeping things and learn to justify the mementos that don’t actually serve me. Am I going to look back in 20 years and see a meaningless sticky note my mum wrote and feel like it was worth saving? Probably. But a pair of jeans she bought for me online? Probably not (especially given the volume. I wonder how many meaningless sticky notes I could keep in the 3D footprint of a pair of folded jeans). It’s not just mum related stuff either. There are many things from 2020-2023 that I feel no longer serve me, but I struggle to get rid of them because I think back to who I was and think things like “My mum was alive when I bought that.”
Slowly but surely, I am learning to let go. I’m not trying to let go of my mum or her memory – I hope time will allow me a lasting grasp on that – but of my grief. It’s not love for my mum compelling me to keep jeans, receipts, towels and bedsheets. Love doesn’t take prisoners. It’s grief that’s holding me hostage. Grief, like any emotion, can become unhelpful, and while I don’t ever expect to stop grieving for my mum, I don’t think clinging to it is going to make me feel any closer to her either. I need to make space in my life (and my home) for other things. And other people.
Life is moving forward and I am living on (whether I like it or not – I do happen to be quite liking it at the moment though).
Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward. (S4E1 Bojack Horseman)
No matter how guilty I feel about it, time passes just like she did. The current of the clock carries me with it and life moves forward. Trying to go against the current only leaves me tired and less prepared for what’s to come, so instead of trying to swim back to a past I can never reach I’m allowing time to take me with it and looking ahead at what’s to come. It’s hard to trust that I won’t regret it, but at the end of the day the option to swim against it was always an illusion and time was always whisking me away to the next present. I might as well experience the ride and maybe even try and enjoy it.
I often describe substance abuse in terms of stage scenery, like it’s just one prop but if you have more props and layer them it starts to become part of the background and there is this image that is often used to describe grief that feels the same but different.
For some reason this is not how I remembered it, but I know it’s the one I mean. I don’t just feel like my jar has got bigger though. To me it feels more like this:
Sometimes it feels wrong get on with my life and fill it with other things. I don’t want to leave her behind, but I can’t stay with her either. Time will keep ticking and I will keep living and I can’t press pause (or, better yet, rewind) and bask in the moments of her existence even if I wanted to. Embracing the passing of time and the change that comes with it is the only way to make it hurt less.
I am not who I was when my mum died and for the most part that’s for the better. I wouldn’t say I’m drastically different as a person, but I think I am mostly a better one. As I’ve changed over the years, my life has changed too. When my mum died I was studying, so something was always going to change eventually whether she died or not. Clinging to parts of my life that no longer serve me only serves to hurt me. Sometimes staying stagnant feels safer, but that doesn’t mean it is. Sometimes a freeze response will not save you from being eaten in the wild. It might seem like a passivity vs. action debate, but really I never made the decision to return to life. It just happened. The tiger went away and I could move again. The choice I made was to keep moving. There were many times I wanted to go back to being still and disengaged with life. It’s scary filling your jar again when you’re not used to carrying much else. Even before my mum died, burnout meant my jar was already pretty empty. Somehow through grief (or in spite of it), I’m filling it more than I have in a long time. I’m living more than I have in a long time. It doesn’t feel easy, but it feels worthwhile.
The thought of my grief not playing a starring role in my life makes me feel incredibly guilty, but I think it would be futile to fight it – and I don’t think it would be happening if I wasn’t ready. This year is the first year I’m not spending her anniversary with my family. In previous years, I’ve made sure those days were free to focus on her. It’s always been a two day event from the 6th (when she died) to the 7th (when she was found). This year I’ll be in Paris, celebrating my boyfriend’s birthday. In some ways it feels like another example of my life moving forward, in other ways it feels like a sign to have something else to focus on. While I hope to incorporate some mum-related things into our activities on the 6th, I am also conscious that, as valid as my grief is, I don’t want to be a downer on the 7th. And weirdly I don’t think my mum would want me to be too (or at least she wouldn’t want to be a bother when I have something positive going on). I have both intentionally and unintentionally been feeling it all in the run up to her anniversary, partly in the hopes of getting past the worst of it and partly from the guilt of not dedicating the day to grief. Her birthday is only a month before so it’s always felt like that was the time to celebrate her life and her anniversary is the time to mourn her death, to really feel it, to ensure her birthday doesn’t become a day for sadness (even if the loss is still felt).
Sometimes the month between her birthday and anniversary feels like the funeral procession in Oliver Twist, like we are all walking slowly towards her anniversary, weighed down by our grief. Eventually the scenery starts to look sinisterly familiar as we pass the last day we saw her, before finally reaching the doorway to her death date. In all the distraction and excitement of a new city I am aware there’s a chance that I won’t feel that sad on Friday and I’m okay with that. You can’t schedule grief, but you can schedule small activities of memoriam, so I’ve got some ideas of mum-related things I can do while away. And maybe this is just how it will be from now on. As the years pass and life moves forward, maybe her anniversary will become more of a day to remember than a week (or month) full of woe. The days around her death and other key events are still important to me, but I can no longer rely on them as a means of connection to her or my grief. There’s no rule that says anniversaries will be when grief shows up the most, and the fact people often feel worse in the anticipatory build up than on the day itself says it all. Maybe over time my grief will become uncoupled from the calendar and the edges of the mumth of mourning will blur – still there, still noticeable, but less contained, shifting towards a more subtle yet constant sleet over periodic heavy snow. I have no doubt the grief will change rather than disappear completely, or that it will be amplified as I age, but I think as time moves forward the peaks of mourning will soften as they’re muffled by the hum of everyday life. I hear my grief scream the most in the quiet moments, so maybe the key to making space for grief and loss within an increasingly busy life is to make time for silence, introspection and remembering her.
I talk a lot about good grief and bad grief and honestly sometimes they can be hard to categorise, but guilt-led grief has to be the worst of all. Guilt-led grief will have you holding onto things you don’t want, letting go of things you ‘don’t deserve’ and feeling bad about being okay on a day you think you should feel sad (and then feeling guilty because your eventual sadness was prompted by guilt and not ‘natural’). I don’t think I will ever stop feeling guilty about my mum’s suicide, but I don’t want my grief to be guilt-driven because a) it fucking sucks and b) it feels like a fucking self-centred way to grieve someone killing themselves. Losing my mum to suicide (specifically) complicated my grief a lot, but at the end of the day I’m still just a daughter that lost her mum and I think that loss holds the real grief. The context is important, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in there and lose sight of the bigger picture. My mum died. It is a hellscape to navigate for anyone, but I think especially as a daughter and especially when its sudden and earlier than expected. I owe it to myself (and my mum) to mourn that loss in its own right. I won’t ever leave to context unstated or shut up about the societal barriers she faced as a disabled person and wheelchair user, but that is more for talking to others than talking with myself in moments of grief. It is a fact and a factor relating to my grief, but it is not the headline anymore (even if in a literal way it is). I used to think it was important to indulge in the context and the guilt, to learn, to punish myself, but time has brought me clarity and those reasons seem dumb and self-indulgent compared to its real weight. Time really will change everything if you let it and while it will never bring my mum back I know it can bring me love, hope and all that other good stuff (and even if I think I’d trade all that for my mum I know that’s not possible so I might as well accept the alternative). When I’m finding it hard to have this outlook or accept the transient nature of time or find the will to live, I remind myself (as if I could forget) that my mum thought killing herself would make our lives easier and, while I think she was the wrongest she’d ever been, I tell myself her death is in vain if I don’t at least try – and while that thinking may be problematic it is at least effective.
I feel like whenever I write about my mum I have all these things to say but instead of finding a way to say them succinctly and string them together in a way that makes sense I end up adding all this verbal foliage and it makes it hard to follow. This post feels more tangled and tangented than the others, like it’s going in all different directions. Maybe that’s a reflection of my life and mind state right now, but I appreciate the fact that when I am writing I get it all out by any means (or memes) necessary. Sometimes poetically and sometimes pathetically. Writing about grief feels like crying in thoughts. Grief doesn’t happen on a schedule. Sometimes you need a good cry and it won’t happen, so I write instead. Mourning at leisure. It’s these quiet moments that allow me to release the pressure before it builds up. It’s like a rest break on the hike of life where I can set down the weight of my grief before I get going again. I’ve been carrying this weight for almost 3 years, but it’s only recently when I really got moving again that I’ve really felt how heavy it is – especially now it’s not the only thing I’m carrying. Sometimes things move so fast and you have so much ground to cover that it’s easy to forget rest is an option (and potentially optimal). Taking a break doesn’t have to mean staying stagnant forever, but it’s a good opportunity to recover and readjust your bootstraps (and bagstraps) before you get going again! And I really must get going when I can, this hike has so much left in store for me! I have so much life left to live.
It feels odd to be moving forward and living on without my mum, but moving forward is not moving on. Time distances me from my grief and from the event and even from who I was, but I do my best to make sure it doesn’t distance me from my mum. I try and feel my grief when it’s there and even the guilt too, but most of all I try and make witty remarks and pancakes. I know I will carry this grief to my own grave, but I will make damn sure I carry her spirit too. The essence of my mum that lives on is worth far more than scarcity-fueled mementos. My mum is scarce in that there is none of her, she is nowhere, yet somehow when I am with my siblings it is so evident that she is everywhere. And like torch bearers I hope we carry the firecracker she was into every room we enter. Nothing will bring her back, but keeping her spirit alive is the next closest thing – and the best part is holding onto such a big personality doesn’t actually take up much room!