Category Archives: Grief

The Things She Missed

Posted in Grief, Uncategorized by

Today is January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, the last day of Christmas. It’s also the 26th anniversary of my mother’s death.

And it’s the day my little girl got a letter from none other than Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I have written before, so many times, about my mother’s death. Writing is a way to track my grief, to understand how it has changed me, and how grief itself changes over time.

Grief never dies, but it does change. And as I have grown older, it has taken on a different focus: motherhood has taught my that my mother’s loss was greater than mine.

I lost so much time with her. For years, my life felt like a collection of moments that I didn’t get to share with her. Those moments still come, but now when they come I also feel the pain of the other side of loss. Her side.

Because she lost so much more. She lost time with me and time with my brother. She lost time with the grandchildren she never got to meet. She didn’t get to be there to see me graduate high school, or college, or graduate school. Or to see me get married, or to welcome the births of my babies. She missed milestones and all the little moments in between.

When your parent dies at the age of 42, there is a pretty good chance you will, at some point, think about yourself also dying at a young age. Especially once you are in the same phase of life your parent was in at the time of their death.

I’m in that phase now, and this is what I know: I can’t imagine any loss greater than losing time with my children.

Over the last two weeks, people all over the world have come to know a slice of my beautiful girl’s character and her beautifully unique outlook on life.

But my mother, the person my daughter is named after, missed it all.

I’ve been here, and as far as I know I will still be here for decades to come, watching my girls grow, experiencing the milestones and the moments in between. That is my greatest joy.

Today, my greatest sadness is for my mom, who has missed so much.

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The World Is Too Much

Posted in Grief, Important Issues, Uncategorized by

angel of greif

I began writing this post with this sentence: “whenever our society experiences an incident of extreme violence or injustice or an epic failure of leadership, I find myself feeling overwhelmed; my thoughts scramble and collide; eventually they collapse.”

I deleted it, then I rewrote it, and then I decided to reframe it. What I wrote about myself is true, but the context is  inaccurate– it implies that the violence and injustice and incompetence I’m describing are aberrations, that they come in short-lived bursts, bookended by a beginning and an end.

What we are experiencing now – the near-constant gun massacres, the violent mob mentality rooted in hate and fueled by rhetoric, the rapes that go unpunished, the racism that goes unchecked, the total failure of our leaders to lead, the feeling of impending crisis – these are not “incidents.” They are our norm.

And the fact that this turmoil is a defining characteristic of the age in which we live only serves to intensify the chaos of my thoughts and feelings. My anger and frustration and grief and despair and fear struggle for pride of place until my mind becomes exhausted and defeated; stymied by its own excess of activity.

So as much as I wish I could come up with something balanced and meaningful, or at least coherent, to say about Orlando, or gun access reform, or racism, or Republicans, or the fact that Donald Trump’s face keeps popping up in my nightmares, I can’t.

I just can’t. The world is too much.

All I can do is grasp onto the tiny moments, and listen to the whispers of what is good in our lives.

Like a conversation with my five-year-old, in which she told me that she was BORN to make people laugh, and the pride I feel in knowing that she believes her mission in life is to bring others joy.

Or the “I love you more” argument I have every night with my 8-year-old, and the powerful gratitude —  the sense of awe — I feel that despite my mistakes and imperfections as a parent my daughter loves me as fiercely as I love her.

These moments aren’t much. They come in short-lived bursts, bookended by a beginning and an end. But they are everything. They have to be.

 

Another Day, Another Shooting

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I didn’t hear about the shooting in Orlando until late Sunday evening. I’d spent the day celebrating my daughter’s birthday with our friends and family. It was a special day; a good day. 

So the news, when I finally saw it, hit me like ice down the back of my shirt. It was a rapid return to reality. 

I was shocked, but not surprised. Mass shootings in America aren’t surprising anymore. The shock we feel is evidence of our humanity: of our compassion and of our fear. We are struck, forcibly, by the pain of the loss of so many lives, and by the reminder of our own vulnerability. We are both heartbroken and afraid. 

But we aren’t surprised — or at least, we shouldn’t be. Massacres by men with guns are nothing new. Anyone who can still view a mass shooting as something extraordinary, as an isolated tragedy, is deluding themselves. We have become a society in which we can expect to have to conjure up “our thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families” again and again and again. 

Mass shootings are not surprising, and we should be mad as hell about that. We should be mad as hell that nothing is changing. We should be mad as hell that political posturing and pissing contests have taken over the national stage,  shoving any real efforts to make common sense changes into a corner sideshow. 

We should be mad as hell that every time a shooting occurs we shout “enough!” at the top of our voices and it still doesn’t make a difference. That we still don’t know when enough really will be enough — it wasn’t enough when a group of schoolchildren were killed, and it wasn’t enough when a group of men and women praying in church were killed.

I’m mad about all these things, but mostly I’m mad — furious, really– at how impotent I feel. I’m mad that I can’t protect my children, that I can’t expect them to be safe at school, or at the mall, or at church, or in a movie theater. And I’m mad that I can’t conjure up hope of anything changing for the better along with my thoughts and prayers. 

Those thoughts and prayers feel pitiful in comparison with the magnitude of what happened in Orlando and is happening everywhere in our country. But right now they, along with my grief and my anger, are with those whose lives were taken, their families, and the LGBTQ community who, even in this so-called liberal society, continue to be marginalized and victimized. 

Death on Facebook

Posted in Grief, Social Media by

Death on Facebook

As I was going through some unpublished drafts of things I meant to write, I came across a post I began almost a year ago, after the funeral of a friend who died at the age of 35.

It started like this:

“Today I attended the funeral of a friend from back in the day. She died on Saturday, at the age of 35. Her name was Sarah Higgins, and she was a good human.

When I say Sarah was a friend from back in the day, I mean she was a friend from way back in the day. Specifically, from elementary and middle school. I hadn’t seen her for 22 years.

I hadn’t seen her for 22 years, and yet her death has hit me hard. Harder than I thought would be possible — I miss her presence in my life, even though that presence existed only virtually, through the seemingly shallow channel of social media.”

And it ended here. I couldn’t get past this point. I was feeling too raw and too confused: I felt a deep sense of grief, and yet I didn’t feel entitled to that grief. I felt guilty for grieving someone whom I hadn’t seen face-to-face for over two decades, as if I were taking something away from those who truly knew and loved her.  I felt as though a Facebook friendship, even though it was based on a childhood friendship, didn’t measure up to the “real life” relationships she had with others.

But a year later, I still find myself thinking about Sarah, missing her quips and anticipating what she would comment on certain Facebook posts. She is still the first person I think of when I need advice on plants or have a story about backyard vermin. And the fact that I still miss someone I knew almost entirely from social media suggests that there is more to be said.

My friend Julie wrote an insightful piece on how much she values social media as a tool to maintain relationships. She talks about how people tend to scoff at the idea that there can be anything truly meaningful in our connections with others through Facebook or Twitter. But she disagrees with this notion, and so do I.

It is true that nothing can replace the connections we create through face-to-face communication. But that fact doesn’t take value away from other means of communication.

The origins of human interaction were intimate: we could only communicate when we were in each other’s presence. But from the moment our most ancient ancestors figured out how to scrawl drawings on the wall of a cave, our communications have constantly been evolving and expanding in scope.

And now we are able to pick up a tiny machine that contains our lives and have a real time conversation with someone as far away from us as the other side of the world, or as close to us as the room downstairs.

Even though our words pass soundlessly through cyberspace, the value of the connection between people is still there. We can get more than just news or updates: we can reach out to one another for advice and comfort and inspiration. We can unite behind a common cause. We can be present for those we care about, even if all we are doing is holding space in our hearts for someone we only ever see on a screen.

I still miss Sarah. Her wit, her quirky insights, her unfailing support for the LGBT community (and really for anyone who was marginalized by society), her compassion for animals, her prickly kindness filled my newsfeed and became part of my daily life. I missed her presence when she died, and I miss it still now.

Human connectedness is a sacred thing, and we like to hold it to traditional standards. But the way we connect with one another is changing. We can be devastated by the loss of a hero or icon we’ve never even met — think of the global heartbreak so many of us shared with the passing of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Prince, and Mohammad Ali. And we can grieve someone we haven’t seen in decades, but who was present in our lives nevertheless.

 

Mother’s Day

Posted in Adoption, Children, Family, Grief, Holidays, Motherhood, Uncategorized by

My youngest daughter woke me up this morning with a whisper – “Mommy! Is it morning time yet?”

I answered yes, groaning just a little as she climbed over my ribs, wincing as the dog took my opened eyes as an invitation to sit on my hair. “Ok,” she told me, “now you can go back to sleep,” and she slammed the door shut to give me some privacy.

Some twenty minutes later, she returned with my husband, her sister, and a plate of pancakes swimming in syrup. I ate a sticky breakfast in bed while my girls showed me their hand-made cards and the dog pierced my soul with his hungry gaze. It was—if not quite bliss – a moment in which I felt blessed.

* * *

Mother’s Day is not a day of simple emotions – not for me, and, I imagine, not for many others. There are so many struggles when it comes to the relationship between mothers and children. We are all children of a mother and cohorts of a society with a rigidly idealized definition of what motherhood should be. Rarely does the reality fulfill the expectation.

And then there are the women who wish they could become mothers, but can’t, and those who can become mothers, but can’t mother the children to whom they gave life. There are the mothers who have had to give a child back to the earth, and the children whose mothers have left the world too soon.

As the adopted daughter of a mother who died young, the celebration of Mother’s Day has always been bittersweet. When I was a child, it was a day when I felt the pull of my connection with the mother I had never met. It was a day when I honored the mother of my heart – and as I grew older while she grew sicker, it was a day when I wondered what would happen to me if she – when she – died.

After my mother’s death, the day was searingly painful. I had eyes only for what others possessed, but I had lost – twice.

As the years passed, my grief mellowed and so did the pain of Mother’s Day. I became a mother myself, which magnified everything good about the day. And I came to understand that the loss of a mother gives a gift of its own – the experience of being loved by the women who mother the motherless.

These women represent the best of what humanity has to offer. They are the grandmothers, the aunts, the neighbors, the sisters, the friends who love where love is needed. I’ve known these women in my own family, and I have met them in many other contexts, in every part of the world.

Mother’s Day is an easy holiday to celebrate. As children of mothers, it is easy to see their value in our lives. As mothers of children, it is easy to see the gifts motherhood has given us — the weight of a tiny person on your chest, the softness of a cheek, the comfort of a small body still warm with sleep, the fierce strength of a child’s embrace.

It’s easy to celebrate the beauty of idealized motherhood.

It’s harder to embrace the darker side, where mistakes, regrets, and loss reside. But I think it is in this side of motherhood where we find its deepest and most powerful meaning. Because it is here where we find the forgiveness, the persistence, the tenacity of a love that transcends everything, even the grave. It’s here where we find the women whose hearts are the deepest wells, who fill the world with their nurturing grace.

For my mothers, for all the women who stood in a mother’s place in my life, and for my children who have given me more than they know, I am filled with gratitude. And for those we have lost, I will mourn.

mom and me

 

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Michele and Grandma