Here I sit, April, the most dreaded month of my life. Its beautiful outside, the sun is shining, new life is blooming, it smells like spring and I’m in a basement, wanting to find a place to crawl deeper and deeper. My mom died April 23, 2018 at 6:00 am. I can close my eyes and I’m there. I can hear the hospital sounds, I can hear the nurses working on a patient in the next room of the ICU, I can feel me running out screaming and people grabbing me to say goodbye. Right now I can hear it and feel it all, every hour of every day three years later. What I can’t hear? Her voice, her laugh, her comfort. I can’t feel her hug me, I can’t smell her comforting smell, I can’t see her out walking across the field. Right now she feels like an imaginary friend I made up for years, because no matter how hard I look, she’s just not here.
If you just read this paragraph and you think it is time I get over it, please, get on your knees and thank God you haven’t lived this because unfortunately, you will someday lose your person and you will know exactly what I am talking about and time will help the wounds, but you will come to a day/a month/an event that will throw you into a loop of living that you would do anything to get out of.
So, here I sit and dread, knowing that every day this week and next is coming on the day I dread the most, reliving the worst day of my life. Looking back on the person I was before and the person I was after. There was a Lynn with a mom and a Lynn without a mom and those people are different. Since I can’t go into anything just halfway, I have dug into my grief journey and others grief journeys to understand it. Grief is so complicated and it takes different shapes and forms for everyone. It reminds me a parenting in an odd way. We all do it differently, there is no roadmap or pamphlet. There’s no roadmap in grief that tells you that at this point, you will now feel angry or on this day, you will wake up with a smile. No one tells you that grief makes you feel guilty and ashamed. Guilty that you are happy sometimes, guilty that you are suddenly crying because a thought popped into your head, ashamed that you’re not “doing enough” to move on.
We do not move on from grief. We move forward with grief. I saw a TED talk a few years back where a woman explained it this way and it was 100 percent true. If you did not know me and met me today, you are meeting Lynn with grief attached to her, that in place of a mom, she has memories, and grief. And its not something that Lynn will leave behind eventually, it will carry along with her until the day she dies.
I feel we need to normalize grief. I feel we should not be embarrassed or ashamed to talk about our grief or even to say yep, I’m having a hard day today and not feel like the other person is thinking (but its been x months). In ten years, I promise you I am going to be saying I had a bad day because all I wanted was to see my mom. I feel like we keep grief private so we do not upset others, that we don’t want to offend anyone. But guess what? If you want to know me as a person, then you want to KNOW me as a person and a part of this person is grief I live with daily. And I don’t mean that I walk up to the cashier at Costco and tell them how I cried today because my mom is dead, but to the people who know us and spend time with us.
So as I sit here this April and think about how I’m just over it already, I am not going to feel guilt for feeling this way. My life overall is happy. I am fun, I do lots of fun things, I run thru life like I’m breaking in like the Kool-Aid man. I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me – my grief isn’t for your pity, but I also am not going to pretend because I feel ashamed I carry this sadness with me.
And this year, on April 23rd is I am going to be thankful for the very worst day of my life. I am going to tell anyone who will listen that I am celebrating the very worst day of my life. I thank GOD I was given the worst day of my life because it means I was loved. I was loved so much by my mom I think I was over-loved if that is a thing. I was shown unconditional love for 37 years of my life and that is something to truly be celebrated. I was given the best gift, the gift of a woman who loved me with her whole being and while she is gone, it is truly a blessing that God gave me her as my person.