A family friend recently died and it brought some of the trauma of my early grief to the surface. Two years and two months into my own loss, here are eight lessons I’ve learned.
8. “Beginnings always hide themselves in ends.” – Mike Posner
In many ways, when my mom died, I thought it was the end of our relationship. But since her body has gone, my love for her has only grown. As Eckhart Tolle says, “Death is the end of a form. Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite. It is eternal.”
The same is true for love.
7. “Life is a series of dots, not a line.” – Ichiro Kishimi
For a long time after my mom died (and sometimes still), I held the narrative that she was “only sixty-eight.” That she “deserved so many more years.” That she should still be here and time was stolen from her and (by proxy) all of us. That was the storyline I told myself (and anyone who would listen).
But here is the truth: her life was 68 years long and I can think of that as too short or perfectly whole.
In American culture, we tend to judge life by what a person contributes to society, the titles they achieve, the jobs they hold, the colleges they attend, etc. But what if we shifted our perspective of “success”? Ichiro Kishimi says each moment of life is a dot. And because it is a circle, it is complete and perfectly whole in and of itself. When you string all the dots together, you get a life. But what matters isn’t the whole picture –it’s each dot. And whichever dot your life ends at, it by itself is complete.
I’ve tried to apply this to my own life by being less achievement based/goal-oriented and more focused on moment-to-moment joy. Eckart Tolle says: “Set goals but know that arriving there is not that important.”
What matters is not the dot you may hit forty steps from now—but this dot, right this second.
In sum: the age someone dies at does not determine the fullness of their life. The way they lived each dot is what counts.
6. “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” – Pema Chodron
When my mom died, the physical and emotional pain was unreal. In the early days, I would wake up and immediately think, “Oh my god, my mom is dead.” It felt like every day I was living a nightmare—one that would never end. I suffer from anxiety and have a prescription for Clonazepam so it was often tempting to take a pill and temporarily numb.
We live in a society that specializes in numbing— with alcohol, drugs, pills, television, social media. We have so many options to escape reality and not feel our feelings. Because, frankly, feeling our feelings sucks. But here is what I learned. Yes, feeling intense grief is awful and deeply unpleasant, but when you allow yourself to feel pain, it eventually recedes. Another wave may come again soon, but no feeling is permanent. I have tried to welcome my pain, not as a symptom of suffering, but as proof of my unending love for my mom. And boy can love hurt.
When I feel bad, I sit with it, knowing it will pass. And when I feel good, I sit with it, knowing it too will pass. Good and bad feelings are like clouds, constantly passing through. None of them last.
But if I can’t sit with darkness, I’ll never feel the light.
5. It’s a myth that only living people can do things
When my mom first died, I remember watching people in the mall—thinking how strange it was they could shop, play video games, eat. All these things that she could no longer do. For a very long time, I sunk into a deep despair, believing dead people could do nothing. I literally had an entry in my notebook called “Things Dead People Can Do” and it was blank.
But Laura Lynn Jackson’s book “Signs” helped me realize my mom was still talking to me—it was me who wasn’t listening.
It’s true—dead people cannot text you, or show up to dinner. But they can love you. And they can find ways to communicate with you.
I have gotten signs from my mom in the strangest places—one of her favorites is the New York Times mini crossword puzzle, Spelling Bee or Connections. Often, I will ask her a question and a day or two later, I will find the answer there. Once, I was deliberating what to do with a piece of writing where one of the characters was named Leona. I was ready to give up, but in the NYT mini the next morning two of the answers spelled out “More Leona.”
The hard part for me remains continually choosing to believe it is her.
No one can give me proof, but I can still believe.
4. “There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbreakable.” – Francis Weller
I love this quote and find it true in so many ways about grief. Pain puts us in touch with the core of our humanity. Until you have touched deep pain, it’s hard to hold real joy. There is something about being totally broken that helps you figure out who you are, what’s important to you, what is worth spending your time on, what you should let go of. They say pain is often the door that opens the door to spirituality and I have found this to be true . Without being broken, I wouldn’t have looked for a deeper sense of being.
3. “Surrender comes when you no longer ask why something happened to you…It means giving up trying to understand what happened and being comfortable with not knowing.” – Eckart Tolle
I spent a lot of time in pursuit of “what happened” to my mom. I wanted to know where my mom went when she died. I know what happened to her body—I held her hand as she took her last breath—but what happened to her? Her soul? I wanted to feel something magical as she died—like her spirit slipping away from her body.
The truth is I felt nothing.
After she died, I looked for answers in every book I could get my hands on—I read over 30 books on grief, 7 books on near-death experiences, 15 texts of spirituality, 2 books by a medium. I even visited two psychics.
Here is what I have to come understand. No one can tell me where my mom went.
Reading about near-death experiences gives me hope.
The idea of communicating with the other side gives me hope.
But I can read every book or visit every psychic and never find the answers I am looking for.
Because they aren’t questions that can be answered.
They are hypotheses and guesses.
I am learning to be comfortable with the idea that until I die (and maybe not even then) I won’t know “what happened” to my mom. But what I believed happened is maybe just as important as what actually happened.
And what I believe, is that she is with me. It goes against everything my rational, science brain was taught. It is a leap of faith, a jump off the cliff. It is hope and insanity. I believe she is with me, even if I have no proof of that.
2.“Some things cannot be fixed, they can only be carried.”- Megan Divine
The best way I’ve found to describe grief is a feeling of perpetual homesickness. You always want to go to someplace you never can again. A place in the past that was safe and warm and welcoming. Your perpetual landing spot. But that place is gone. The door is shut. You think at first maybe that place has just moved. That if you keep traveling you will find it. And so you look and look and look. You go to Europe and think, “Mom, are you here?” You go to the cemetery and see the trees rustling and think, “Mom, are you here?” You stand in her empty bedroom and sniff her pillow which still smells like her and say, “Mom, are you here?” Every cell in your body aches for how much you want them to be here.
That feeling doesn’t go away. But over time, it becomes a part of your new normal. It builds the foundation of your new self. The longing is real—but since you cannot bring your person back to life, you have to find a way to channel the longing into something productive. For me, that has been writing.
1. “After a loss of this magnitude, there is a split between those who know and who don’t.”- Megan Divine
The thing that helped me the most in navigating early grief was finding my grief tribe. I didn’t attend any formal grief groups, but I found several people who lost a parent, sibling or other close relative (some recently, some years ago). They were my advisors, my sounding boards, my shoulder to cry on. Until you’ve suffered a deep loss, you can’t understand. It’s not that you don’t want to, or you can’t empathize, but you literally cannot understand the gut consuming pain that comes from knowing, in every second of every day, you will never see your person again.
My advice to new grievers is find other grievers. They understand the random triggers—how a sign on a highway for a perfume ad can remind you of your mom’s scent and send you into a rabbithole of despair. How happy events (like birthdays, holidays, graduations, new babies) can be tinged by such sadness. Your grief tribe is your safe place. With them, you don’t have to put on a happy face or act like you are okay. You can be as broken as you are and they will love you because of it.
To anyone struggling during this season, I’m sending you love. And please know, that our deepest pain often delivers our most beautiful lessons.
Xo,
Lisa
