Like A Mum, Grief Grows
What I've learned from over a decade without my other half. Plus, a sweeping tale of chosen family and a feel-good show about grief.
I miss the early years of grief.
When I could still hear her voice, recall her smell, feel the aged softness of her freckled skin.
Now, the memory of her is as hazy as the cigarette smoke that blanketed the kitchen table of my childhood.
I miss when her death was just a story, rather than a truth.
When I thought running away could make the reality of death go away. A time before I realized avoidance is a circle that always returns us to the start.
I miss grief in its germination phase, when the seed first began swelling and preparing its protective coat.
A time when grief was just a single ending; simply the end of a heartbeat; the disappearance of a familiar body in our apartment.
Grief doesn’t get easier with time, it grows. Like a double chrysanthemum, a ‘mum,’ it continuously blossoms, revealing layer upon layer of dense petals swirling around an obscured center. Even after we think it’s run its season, it returns, each time with new leaves and flowers.
As the length of her absence grows, the single ending morphs into several; an accumulation of beginnings that never began.
I miss when the grief was but a shallow crater, defined only by the immediate impact of her death. In the early years, the crater transformed into a burrow, a safe space I could hide in. The burrow deepened into a depression, and then a trench.
As each year passes without her, the grief drills deeper into the soil, excavating new memories and lessons, but always at risk of becoming a sinkhole if the underlying foundation were to collapse.
Familiarity is easily mistaken for understanding. The grief is familiar now, but I’ll never understand it. The act of understanding acts as a salve, soothing the storm of uncertainty and fear whirring within us.
But understanding only provides the illusion of control. Perhaps this is why children ask so many questions—they sense their powerlessness. No matter how much we know, we are all powerless against the forces of grief.
From my mom’s ruthless will to survive, I learned life is a gift. But greater than the gift of life she gave me, was the gift of us.
An us forged out of necessity. An us defined as much by her past—marked by the early childhood abandonment that would make her forever yearning for boundless love—as her then present—bounded by the vulnerability of becoming partially paralyzed after an aneurysm at 40.
After that first aneurysm, our household of two became one. “Love, Martha and Anna,” I signed at the bottom of every letter. After that aneurysm, she had two birthdays: the day she was born, and the day she was reborn. She lost so much of herself when her brain filled with blood. But she showed me every loss births something new.
From losing the ability to do what she loved—gardening, playing piano, reading—she gained the love she had always wanted. A love not confined by mother-daughter convention; a love beyond definition or condition; a love deeper than the sapphire sea in which she could only swim in her dreams.
I’ve now spent one third of my life without her. If loss catalyzes a rebirth, then I’ve spent the last third of my life like a newborn learning how to exist untethered from the mother’s womb. I was defined by her existence until she ceased to exist. Maybe my grief over the last 11 years has just been growing pains.
Some see writing about the dead as being stuck in the past. But a writer excavates the past to give meaning to the present. Writing about the past is a form of processing and release. With each word, I move across the page, from left to right, sentence upon sentence, building forward momentum until the story is complete.
To stay silent is to stay stuck in the past. If we don’t give voice to the voiceless, who will? My past is my present because my cells are made of hers. She will always live on in me and through me.
Best,
(Martha and) Anna
Reading 📖
“When you lose your mama there’s no such thing as a long time ago,” says aunt Irene to Annie, whose mother abandoned her when she was an infant. Annie is determined to find her mother so she travels to Memphis, where she is believed to be living. Annie’s grief unites her with Niecy, whose mother was murdered by her father when she was an infant, making them more than best friends, but “cradle sisters.”
In Kin, Tayari Jones takes us on the journey of these two women coming of age in the American South during the civil rights movement. It’s a sweeping, heartfelt tale of tending to a mother womb and finding chosen family (hence ‘Kin’). I especially related to Niecy, whose early trauma makes it hard for her to live for herself. Finishing it on the eve of my own mother’s death anniversary gave me a glimmer of hope.
Some sections that stuck with me:
“We come to love people in many ways. Much is made of the burning love that hits you like a smoldering remnant of a star hurled down to earth. Yet this is not the only type of love any more than the camellia is the only flower. There is the love that blooms from decency, and from that love, passion.”
“I didn't even say she had died, because that was something a person did. A person lived; a person died. I said she was dead because that's forever. That's what she was. My mother was dead.”
“No matter who your mama is, or how long she’s been gone, you can’t help but miss her. When you are born, she marks you with her milk, even if you never tasted her breast. That’s not hoodoo, it’s just the way the body and the spirit come together to make you a person.”
Articles
⚰️ What science knows about grief.
👨 A beautiful grief story of a daughter discovering she had two dads.
🐶 Love lessons from Ramy Youssef’s dog.
💁♀️ On the enduring fantasy of being “just a girl” and deciding to grow up.
Nobody’s going to do it for you. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve fallen prey to the worry that I’m running out of options; I’d become Sylvia Plath sitting under the fig tree, watching my life branch out before me while various hopes and dreams shook loose and rotted at my feet. But despite what our youth-obsessed culture would like us to believe, there are always more options. There is always still time. Until there isn’t. - Shannon Keating.
Watching 📺
I’ve been saving the latest season of Shrinking (Apple TV) for this death anniversary, but got derailed by the new season of Four Seasons (Netflix), which I wasn’t expecting to have a strong grief plot. I won’t spoil it for you but it hits similar notes as Shrinking, depicting how we find joy and laughter and connection after loss.
If you haven’t seen the first season, the show (created by Tina Fey) is an adaptation of the 1981 film of the same name, centered around three couples navigating mortality, and the complexity of marriage and friendship in their 50s and 60s. It’s the kind of show that makes you laugh and cry simultaneously.
Listening 🎧
My friend recently suggested we watch this rom-com, Yesterday, about a struggling singer-songwriter in an English town who wakes up after a bus accident to a world in which The Beatles never existed. More than a cute, endearing rom-com, it’s an homage to The Beatles expansive discography. Watching the film reminded me of The White Album I bought my mom for Christmas one year when I was a kid. Only upon re-listening yesterday did I realize there is a track named after her.
Martha, my dear
You have always been my inspiration
Martha, my love
Don’t forget me
Martha, my dear
Snacking 🍌
If you don’t already know this about me, I’m obsessed with bananas because they remind me of a nightly ritual I had with my mom. After she died, every time I saw a cute banana item or confection, I thought of her. So on my travels, I started collecting them—banana decor, banana jewelry—and tasting every banana creation in sight.
The friend’s mom I refer to in the above personal essay made an incredible banana strawberry pudding this week that brought me right back to my own mom. It even had Nilla wafers, which my grandma loved to use in her baking. She inspired me to search for banana pudding in the city. I happened to be in Craig’s last night picking up cookies and by some cosmic stroke of bereaved luck, they make a limited edition banana pudding.