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I want my mom. I just want to lay my head in her lap, let her rub my back, and take a break. This is how I feel every time I get sick, when I feel overwhelmed, and lately, when I hear the stories of suffering that the coronavirus pandemic has caused. I miss her all the time, but I can feel the creep of anxiety when I think about how stressful it would have been to manage her multiple conditions in the midst of this crisis.
Still, I crave the woman who stopped breathing 12 years ago on an otherwise unremarkable day in February. I held her when she collapsed, watched her have a seizure, and soon after, watched her leave this world. As I promised her we would be, we were in the home I grew up in, surrounded by family.
In the years leading up to that day, I had tried to prepare myself for her death. My mother had had multiple sclerosis since I was 13, and nine years later, she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. After ravaging her bones, her cancer decided to camp out in her brain. There was no denying the ultimate outcome, but as I learned after she died, preparing for someone you love to leave you doesn’t mean you’ll ever be ready for it..
When it happened, it didn’t matter how much time I’d spent reading Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s On Death and Dying or the number of times I’d reminded myself that this is how it would end. I felt lost. My mother had not only been my mom, she had also been my anchor and my compass.
As a young person, I had organized my life around being a caregiver. Now she was gone, and with her I lost a formative part of who I was. It was disorienting. I realized that her death—the immediate fact of it—would not even be the hardest part. Death is just the beginning of an zigzagging, confusing, and life-altering grieving process. Helping my mom die on her own terms was far easier than what came next.
As hard as those early days and weeks were for me, I cannot even begin to imagine what it would feel like to lose her right now. To not have the comfort of spending her final moments with our relatives and loved ones. To not have been able to visit her during her multiple hospitalizations. To not have had friends who traveled hours, even through a blizzard, to be with me as I navigated her loss. The opportunity to grieve in the embrace the people who love you is yet another thing we’ve lost to COVID-19.
The months after my mother died are a blur. What I do remember is the judgment I felt as I marked the anniversaries of her death—1 month, 6 months, 12 months. I could see that some were frustrated that I hadn’t “gotten over it.” I wasn’t “good” at moving on. Instead I continued to grieve the loss, and I struggled with depression and anxiety for much longer than what others considered reasonable. If I’m honest, I think some part of me agreed with them. I should feel better, I thought. But 12 years later, I have come to understand that you never “get over it.”
You grow through the loss. You change. You adapt. But you don’t get over it.
I still grieve and celebrate my mother. I had to grieve her when I got my dream job in Barack Obama’s White House and she wasn’t there to experience meeting the first black president. I wept constantly when I got engaged, not because I was worried about getting married, but because the one person who would care about every single detail as much as I did wasn’t there. There was no way my then fiancé, who is wonderful, was going to get half as excited as I was, or as my mother would have been, about custom letterpress invitations. And now, when I cry for the baby I planned to give birth to this year, the baby we worked so hard to create and that I sacrificed my body for, the baby that just isn’t meant to be, all I want in the world is for my mother to be here to comfort me. “Not getting over it” has allowed my mother to remain an active part of my life even 12 years later. It is impossible to know me without knowing my mother.
I know that when the anniversary of her death rolls around each year, right around when she died, I will have an epic meltdown. It is as if my body remembers the trauma and just shuts down. I spend her birthday and that anniversary surrounded by people who love me and are prepared to provide me with a glass of bourbon (neat) and a box of tissues. Usually at the same time.
As someone who doesn’t think of herself as “emotional,” it has taken some time for me to accept that complicated feelings around grief are normal. When I struggle, I remind myself that I lost my mother, my best friend, and my compass. I’d oriented my life around a sick parent since before I started high school; her illness and her death are part of me. There’s no getting over that. I think about my mom every day and talk about her regularly with family and friends, many of whom never had a chance to meet her. I may have buried her, but she still has a place and a presence in my life and in the lives of the people who love me. I’ve chosen to let my grief evolve in the way that feels most natural to me.
But 12 years of grieving has shown me that there’s no right way to do it. So if you’re grieving—especially suddenly, in the middle of what is an unquestionably hard time for everyone—consider this permission to stop trying to “perfect” the process or move on. Don’t take it from me, although I do have over a decade of experience in this realm. Take it from my mom. If she were still here, she would tell you to relax and that it’s okay. She’d sooth you. And then she’d feed you.
Marisa Renee Lee is the cofounder of Supportal, a platform that makes it easy for people to respond when someone they care about is faced with a life-changing challenge. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @marisareneelee.
