Leaping into post-traumatic growth!
Or how I'm having a hard time feeling my feelings
Well, friends. We are now at the point in my grief journey where I can happily share that now that my mom has been dead for two months, and her California and Michigan memorials (both of which I was charged with planning) are over, and we’ve scattered her ashes in the first two of several locations, and I’ve actually had three entire days at a family’s lake house to float in the water, and do outdoor yoga, and take a long nap, I find myself refreshed and restored and ready to move into whatever’s next (i.e. making meaning of my experience while simultaneously returning to my old self, and getting back to my old routines, and returning to my pre-“mom-has-stage-four-cancer-and-is-dying” sense of—
Wait, I’m sorry. What was that, Therapist/Death Doula/Grief-familiar friend/Universe? I’m NOT actually able to skip to the part of the grief journey where I have post-traumatic growth and this shitstorm is behind me? Wait. You’re telling me this shitstorm will NEVER be fully behind me, it will always be part of me? And, I’m sorry, I have to actually FEEL the grieving part of the grief journey and let it take its sweet ass time? And there’s no checklist or study group or yoga pose or journal prompt that will make that journey go faster? Also, what do you even MEAN that I actually can’t go back to my pre-“mom-has-stage-four-cancer-and-is-dying” life and pick up exactly where I left off in February 2025 before I learned she was sick, that my old self is gone, that I’m currently shedding her, and that my work now is to discover who I’ll be in the after?
The fuck?
Friends, I must tell you, I am not a “sitter” or a “waiter” or a “just roll with it and take it easy” kind of person by nature. I am a doer. And I don’t say this as a humble brag or an outright brag or some kind of Girl Scout badge of honor. I’d like to be a sitter/waiter/just-roll-with-it-and-take-it-easy person, an enjoyer of doing nothing, a person who can just consistently be present and stop being productive, girl mossing my way through the world. I’m trying (oh, the irony).
Relatedly, I’d also like to be someone who can just fully fall apart. Whilst alone, or with friends, or while sitting out in public. But perhaps unsurprisingly, I am not this person. I am a keep your shit together person. I am, cry alone while listening to the right song kind of person. Which is not even a choice, believe me. It’s simply my default operating system.
“I have some words of wisdom I want you to live by,” my mom’s cousin’s wife told me at the luncheon after my mom’s second memorial. We were at a restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan on a warm and surprisingly non-humid late June day. Thirty-some people had come to the memorial at the church where my parents were once married, where my grandparents ashes were once scattered, where we had just buried my mom’s ashes. These thirty-some people included relatives I hadn’t seen since my early twenties. And frankly, I had no idea what kind of advice this particular relative was about to impart. Was it going to be a religious speech?
But to my great relief the next words she uttered while patting my back were, “Self care.” Self care! Yes! Words of wisdom I could get behind. “You’ve been doing a lot over this past year—way too much— and pretty soon you’re going to hit a wall. Believe me.”
Actually, Joanne (not her real name), I will not hit a wall. I am an eldest daughter and recovering people pleaser. I have yet to meet a wall that I can’t leap over or rearrange or tackle with my to-do list.
Of course, that is a lie. Death is that wall. Grief is that wall. And at some point I know I will fully hit it. Except not today.
“What’s your day like today?” a mom friend asked me this morning after we’d dropped off our kids at camp.
“Oh, you know, working from home—and trying to figure out when I can fit in just a couple of small breakdowns this summer.”
Which I said laughingly and in jest. Except also not? Like, I truly feel like I need to pencil in breakdown somewhere into my calendar. Ideally on a Friday. Ideally before the kids are home at 5pm. Ideally with enough buffer time that I can ice my face and drink a glass of water with electrolytes after.
Am I insane? Am I doing this thing all wrong? Maybe.
Or maybe this is exactly what grief looks like. Maybe grief doesn’t arrive on your doorstep in a Victorian mourning gown. Maybe it doesn’t envelope you in a wispy nightgown and tuck you into your canopied bed to retire for six months straight. Or maybe it does. But maybe it’s also waking up each morning and making your coffee and preparing the kids lunches and taking the subway to work and chatting with colleagues and laughing about Love Island and coming home to feed the cat and do the laundry and walk the dog and catch up on The Pitt, all the while feeling oddly normal and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
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An obligatory friendly reminder to consider purchasing Hear Her Howl or requesting it at your library. And if you’d be willing to leave a review on Amazon or Barnes & Noble to help others find it, I’d be forever grateful.