2025-02-28 10:26

Status: ongoing

After my mom died, I heard multiple times how very strong I was. What I was supposed to be doing, what should I be saying? Did they think I was callous for not weeping at the funeral? Did they think I was putting on a front? Truth be told, my grieving began 18 months prior, the minute the surgeon came out and told me she had small cell lung cancer. I knew what that meant for her - death. My grief began then, at that moment. It continued each time we'd go to chemo or when she needed a blood transfusion. It continued when she lost her hair. It continued when tumors spread onto the nerves of her arm and she could no longer use it; not to put on earrings, not to hold a cup, not to pick up her grandson. One night, after having dinner at her house, I wept the entire way home, realizing that the number of meals she'd make for me were limited. I knew what was coming. When she died, even though I saw it coming, it was there, just as Didion says, the swift empty loss.

She writes about her own personal grieving process, her struggles to resolve his death in her mind. She writes of how very unique it is to each situation, loss of a parent versus the loss of a spouse. These sentences ring very true:
_Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

my-thoughts

As I read this I feel like my grieving began in November 2021, when one night I got a message from her that she doesn't have any space for anything romantic in her life, and that she does not want to give me false hopes.

I knew what that meant - death. Death of the hope that I had build since last few months, death of the hope that I would be inevitably building in the death arrives for real. My grief began then, at that very moment. Whenever she would act cold, it felt like the death I am scared of touched me softly. Even that soft touch of death was gut wrenching. After a few days, she would come back again to touch me. She touched me many times in the next two years. Some nights I would cry for the upcoming death. After every conversation with her, I would cry, realising that the number of such conversations I would have with her were limited. Some nights I would embrace the fact of the upcoming and ongoing death, and feel at peace. On the final day, when the death arrived, with a long note ending with a "goodbye", I didn't cry. I had seen it coming. I was waiting for it. I went inside my bathroom, washed my face, took about hundred photographs of myself in the mirror. I knew I was alive. I told myself that I would be fine. I had my black shirt on. It was wet with water I had thrown on my face. May be the shirt didn't want to be drenched with tears that day.

References

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815.The_Year_of_Magical_Thinking