This Is What Grief Feels Like
On longing for my mother. Plus, gilded rage and a banana bread that honours the dead.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen water as perfect as the crystalline Caribbean sea off the west coast of Barbados. Every day at noon and sunset, I do laps along our shoreline, and finish by floating on the water’s surface, staring up at the clear blue sky, breathing in the salty air. The year is 2014, and it’s here I learn to surf and complete my scuba training. The water is so warm, that even at the bottom, I don’t need a wetsuit. My then boyfriend and I snorkel until our fingers turned to pruned grapes, the visibility so good we’re entertained for hours by the schools of innocent fish that swarm around the vibrant coral. I’m living in paradise, seven months before my mom will die unexpectedly, I have no idea what lies ahead.
Two months later, I’m by myself much further south, in Peru. I naively think surfing the Atlantic ocean will compare to surfing the Caribbean. I’m sorrily mistaken and the waves swallow me whole, leaving me concussed and vulnerable. Two weeks later and I’m scuba diving off the Galapagos Islands. I’m in a full wetsuit but can’t shake the chill that cuts to my bone. I barely make out the distinctly unnerving shape of hammerhead sharks in the near distance. The water is murky and full of potential danger: a sudden current can thrust my body off in another direction; an unexpected creature is only visible once they’re too close for comfort.
In the weeks after my mom died, I keep having a recurring nightmare from which I wake up crying, sometimes screaming. In real life, my mom was partially paralyzed, so she couldn’t swim, despite being a big swimmer earlier in her life. In this dream, mom has an anchor tied to her ankle and she’s drowning. I’m trying to save her but I can’t pull her weight, and I’m drowning with her.
Some people say grief gets easier over time; that the cries become fewer and farther apart; that the emotional weight loses its intensity. But I disagree. The longer I go from the last day I saw my mom, the more painful it gets; the more I miss her. It’s like I’m a kid again who naively thinks she’s going to be standing in the kitchen whenever I open the front door. I long for the early days of grief—let’s call it the honeymoon phase—mom is drowning but we’re at the water’s surface, it’s clear, I can see her, I can hear her, I can feel her distress pulsing through her fingertips gripping onto me for dear life.
Now, it’s like I’m surfing in Peru, or scuba diving in the Galapagos: the ocean is more powerful, the tides stronger, the water is thick and full of uncertainty, it’s a cold from which I can never escape, and I’m alone. I can’t see her anymore. She’s still drowning, and I’m still trying to save her, but I can’t feel her grip. I’m grasping for her, frantically reaching in all directions but all I see is darkness. There’s this sense that she’s so close, yet so far. I can almost make out the sound of her voice, almost make out the contours of her face. I squeeze my eyes and try with all my might to block out the noise of everyday life to get back to her but she’s gone.
Someone recently asked me what my “perfect day” would entail. Before my mom died, she was the last person I wanted involved in my perfect day. But now, my perfect day would be filled with her; some attempt at making up for lost time. There is a deep longing that grows and swells the longer I go without her. And so if I have any unsolicited advice this Mother’s Day, it’s to spend as much time with your mom as possible. Even if it’s unbearable, even if it leaves you irritable or angry or sad. One day you might just find yourself searching for her in a vast, dark ocean, unable to see what once was so clear.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
Forbes - The Best Beauty Looks At The 2022 Met Gala
I feel conflicted reporting on a bunch of celebrities in pretty gowns and men’s skirts when the same day, the news leaked about Roe vs. Wade. I do write about style and beauty, not politics, but still, something feels wrong drawing attention to the country’s most privileged while women’s rights are simultaneously regressing back half a century. Anyway, if you care about what women did with their nails, face and hair to portray “Gilded Glamour” (aptly themed I might add), check out my latest for Forbes.
Reading 📖
It took me a while to get into it but I’m loving Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow. (I only recently found out that the author, Kat Chow, is also the co-host of one of my favourite podcasts—Code Switch). The journalist’s mother, who was born just a few weeks after mine, died when Chow was just 13 years old. “The passage of so much time hasn’t dulled the ache,” as NYT reviewer Gaiutra Bahadur writes. “A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is.”
I always struggle to articulate grief so whenever I come across an apt description, I’m dumbfounded. Here are some excerpts that hit close to home:
“She’d want you to be happy, not suffering.
I couldn’t blame them for saying such things, but each time someone said my mother was watching over us and would have wanted us to be happy, I privately disagreed. To have been happy would have been to disrespect her life.
Still, those assurances:
She’s watching over you.She’s with you every day.
She’s everywhere.She’s alive in your memories.
Despite myself, It took their words literally, my newborn grief latching onto every word. My imagination gorged itself on this hope.”
“Freud wrote famously about mourning and melancholia. These two types of grief were distinct from one another, he posited in an essay from 1917. Mourning had an end in sight; a person in mourning had a grief that adhered to a specific person. But melancholia was an ongoing state—pathological, almost. The melancholic may know that have lost something, but not exactly what they have lost.
The scholar Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way in The Melancholy of Race. ‘The melancholic eats the lost object—feeds on it, as it were.’ Eats, feeds. As though those who have internalized loss become ravenous in their hunger for sustaining their grief. It bloats them, but they continue to feast.
Perhaps, instead of asking if I am exorcising or taxidermizing you, I should ask if really, I am taxidermizing myself. What within my grief am I afraid to lose? It is the idea of her, of course. Here, so many years later, I can’t shake her death and don’t seem to want to in the first place. Eats, feeds, eats, feeds—insatiable.”
“In a half decade or so, I will realize that I have all but forgotten how you sound. The only way I recall the pitch of your voice and where your vowels sharpen then soften is when I remember you howling the cat’s name.”
Articles:
⚖️ What’s next if Roe goes.
📖 The Republicans have mastered the art of narrative.
✊ 7 ways to channel your anger about the likely end of Roe.
🍲 The power of women feasting.
“Women are always told to tame their desires, to stifle their appetites, to not look gluttonous, to not take up space.” - Heather O’Neill.
✈️ The end of the all-male, all-white cockpit.
“It just continues to reinforce this image,” Dr. Alan Meyer said. “This simultaneously plays into this often subconscious association between whiteness and maleness and technical competence.”
👀 A short story about dying and the need to be witnessed.
“He got exactly what he wanted. He has thirty reliable witnesses. Even if half of them die or move away or come to hate him, he still has fifteen.
When he dies, he will be surrounded by a loving family, who will remember when he still had hair. Who will remember every night that he came home stinking drunk and yelling. Who will remember his every failure, and love him in spite of it all. When all his witnesses die, his life will be over.” - Sheila Heti.
🎤 Have you ever considered how the Spice Girls manufactured girl power?
👨🎤 Or that The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” is sad and gay?
👩🍳 Why it’s time to retire the Julia Child trope.
“What once seemed like a form of flattery now reads more like a patronizing attempt to confer legitimacy upon female chefs, particularly those who belong to marginalized communities.” -Mayukh Sen.
Watching 📺
To be honest, I don’t think most attendees of the Met Gala truly understood the assignment. The Gilded Age was a period of economic growth from the 1870s to early 1900s. It was the age of excess, no gown or hat was too lavish for the era. And so, if you want to really see some costumes that represent the time, I suggest watching HBO’s The Gilded Age rather than red carpet reruns from the Met Gala. I’m not one for historic dramas but there’s something about this one that’s got me hooked—maybe it’s the glitz and glamor of the sets and outfits or the thrill of imagining New York City at the turn of the century.
My only qualm with it is that I wish they cast lesser known actors to play the main female roles. I will forever think The Good Wife when I see Christine Baranski, Sex And The City when I see Cynthia Nixon and The Leftovers when I see Carrie Coon. Still, if you miss Downton Abbey or need something to replace Bridgerton (although this feels much more classy), this is your cup of tea.
Listening 🎧
If you’re like me and feeling guilty for indulging in the Met Gala while the Roe vs. Wade was happening, let this episode of Keep It absolve all your guilt. Why must we choose between the two?
“There’s this resting shame about famous women enjoying themselves. Did anybody say this about any sporting event? That all the people should leave the arena and go to D.C.? ” - Louis Virtel.
“People also feel ashamed of themselves for caring about something they consider is stupid so they have to reflexively point out that they’re not being stupid by showing, ‘hey I care about this thing that happened.’
When people were getting mad that the Met Gala was trending higher than the SCOTUS leak—do you know how internet algorithms work? Something that just came out a second ago is not going to be trending higher than something people have been talking about all day.” - Ira Madison.
They also interview Amber Ruffin, the hilarious genius behind many of the jokes on Late Night With Seth Meyers, talk about their teenage gay traumas and review a new doc I’m excited about—White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Snacking 🍌
Every year on my grandma’s birthday, my mom used to buy a slice of iced chocolate chip banana bread from a bakery across the street and light a candle. So this Mother’s Day, I’m eating banana bread in honour of both of the women who raised me. If you’re looking for a banana bread that has meaning, stay tuned for GoNanas new Cookies n’ Cream flavour launching May 15th, created to honour the founder’s friend who died of suicide.
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