My mom was my barometer.
She could tell me if I was overreacting. She could give me examples from her own parenting so I could better gauge if what I was spiraling over was something I truly needed to be concerned about or could let go.
She knew when I wasn’t feeling well or when I was upset. She understood my ticks, like when I rub my thumb on the outside of my ear, indicating I’m tired or stressed. Sometimes, when my ears are cold, I just like the way it feels.
She empathized with my penchant for worry and had a way of easing my mind.
She was, after all, a mother who raised a son with an anaphylactic allergy to peanuts in a time before epipens were common. How many races to the hospital, my brother’s face exploded like a pufferfish and his throat closing, did she make?
She was cool, and what made her composure even more stunning is that its origin wasn’t a lack of care or compassion. She just always understood the assignment.
Kurt only came to me in dreams twice. The first time was shortly after he died. My parents were in Ohio with me, sleeping on a futon in my front room.
In the dream, Kurt was talking to me on the telephone, though he was somehow still present, too. He was telling me he had to go.
I must have been crying in my sleep because I woke up to my mom sitting on the edge of my bed, her hand gently resting on my head. She didn’t say anything, at least not right away, tears just silently slipping down my face.
I think about the immensity of the pain she carried then with my brother, too, in the mist of his own heartache. She must have felt how far she needed to stretch her love to protect us both. She must have wondered if either of us would be too broken to survive.
When I first got the call, I didn’t believe she had died because I hadn’t felt her leave.
Now, knowing what we know about her brain injury, she was gone before she even got to the hospital.
I don’t lament the hope we had for those few days.
I don’t regret saying out loud: “I think I would know if she was gone. I still feel her here.”
I can think rationally about how those feelings were simply my mind helping me cope with what felt like an impossibility. Part of the genius of our brain is its ability to understand the information we need to be spoon fed and what can come in a rush.
Love, the floodgates open, euphoria reigns. Grief, start sandbagging.
The truth is: I still feel her here.
Still.
Still.
Still.
Still, I’m lost without her physical presence.
I’m unmoored, unanchored, topsy-turvy. I try to think of other, less ordinary ways to say what I’m feeling. Why can’t I find a description as extraordinary as the loss?
I understand the language of grief. Why is my tongue so twisted by this specific absence then?
The whole world is peculiar and foreign. Is this really the street I’ve driven hundreds of times, mindlessly going to pick up a prescription? Are these the same sidewalks my dog and I have rambled for years? Why does the city I’ve know for 25+ years feel dusky and unfamiliar?
I feel artificial. I wonder sometimes if I’m losing my mind. I’m scared I’m never going to feel good again.
That’s when I want to call my mom most. I want her to talk me back to my center.
In a brief video of Anderson Cooper talking to psychoanalyst Francis Weller about his book “The Wild Edges of Grief,” Weller talks about the need to honor grief.
Living to deliberately avoid what grief is telling us about ourselves inevitably backfires.
“But at some point, the strategies fail, and then something more genuine is asked to be encountered,” Weller says.
I think of David Attenborough’s documentary “Ocean,” the scenes of the bottom trawlers scraping the sea floor clean, not in renewal but like a botched abortion, sediment and rock rising in both protest and resignation, marine life shoveled into nets indiscriminately.
Interestingly, just when you think Attenborough can’t drag you any deeper into hopelessness, he unveils the ocean’s greatest strength: her resilience.
With a little bit of our help, she has an amazing capacity for regeneration.
I remember that’s my strength, too. Resilience that’s not tied to indifferent endurance or defiance but is instead dependent on my willingness to meet an ask for authenticity with vulnerability.
All of the things that make me feel unsteady and unhinged are necessary. In many ways, just like grief, I am the same, same, but different.
I am me … and not me.
The work, I remind myself, isn’t getting over or even through.
The work is running my head and heart over a landscape I don’t recognize anymore and learning who I am anew.