Real Talk: Facing My Mother’s Death

“For four months, I slept with my light on. I had never really been afraid of the dark, but now the minute I flipped the switch down, the panic started to rise in my chest, threatening to spill out of me. Paranoia was new to me, but it quickly became familiar. Every sound was full of menace, and in the dark my imagination added its own special brand of terror.

So I slept with my lights on all night. In fact, I barely slept at all. I would read until 3 or 4am, until dawn was near and I felt safe enough to close my eyes. I would fall asleep by 5 and get up at 7:30am in order to get ready for work.

I had never considered how my father’s move out of my childhood home might affect me. With the comfort of his presence removed, a cloud of uncertainty swept over me. For all of my posturing and putting on a brave face, I simply felt like a little kid who had lost my mother, and now, any semblance of stability or normalcy. I was in uncharted territory, with the silence of everything familiar to me filling my ears.

My mind cruelly kept returning to that sunny Wednesday in March. Earlier that day, my father had called to inform me that my mother had gone unresponsive, and had been placed on a ventilator. It was unsettling to hear, but I found stubborn hope in the fact that she had been near death a few times before. Surely this time was no different. She would bounce back, and we would have another victory under our belt and laugh, relieved. She was invincible. She was a fighter. She would make it.

I went to church that night, determined not to allow myself to worry. Sometime during praise and worship I glanced at my phone, and noticed the missed calls. Lots of them. Either something had gone miraculously right or horribly wrong.

I called my dad back and my sister answered the phone. I asked her what was happening, but instead of her telling me that my mom had come back to us, she handed the phone to my father. He was hesitant, but his voice sounded clear. “Baby girl I’m sorry.” And then ten words. Only ten. “Your mother has gone on to be with the Lord.“

The scream was out before the sentence was complete. The floor suddenly moved several feet up from its foundation and received me in the form of a puddled, weeping mess.  My best friend manifested out of thin air, trying to comfort and calm me as I wailed like a madwoman. My father was trying to speak to me over my screams, and I could hear my name echoing distantly.  It was as though my soul had been rent in two.

My Pastors wanted to pray with me. I sat before the altar, broken. My spiritual mom sat down on the stairs in front of me. She didn’t have soft, passive words for me. I didn’t need them. I didn’t want them. Instead she had a plan of action. “It’s okay to grieve but you grieve behind closed doors. When you have to face people, you wash your face and you put on strength. Be strong.” She said more, but for some reason those words stuck out more than the others. They embedded themselves somewhere deep in me.

In my apartment that night, I sat cross-legged on the floor next to my blow up bed, facing my closet. I rocked back and forth, tears streaming, mouth open, silently screaming until I could barely breathe. There was nothing surreal about the moment. The agony was definitely real. The conversation with my father replayed constantly and the tears flowed afresh every time.

This was heartbreak. All other experiences bearing that label now paled in comparison. I sat in that black hole of grief for God knows how long, until my body gave out from exhaustion and I slipped into a black, dreamless, sad sleep.

I awoke the next morning with tears escaping from my still-shut eyelids. Marietta knocked on my door, asking me if she should take the day off. She didn’t like the idea of leaving me alone. I told her to go. I would be okay. I sat on my bed sobbing.

At some point I realized that I couldn’t stay at home. As weak as I felt,  I would never make it out of bed and I was afraid that the grief would paralyze me and swallow me whole. So I got up. I cried my way through a shower. I managed to get dressed and pull my hair into a bun. I think I even managed gloss and mascara. Then I got onto Bus 91 and rode it to work.

“The landscape of life changes most drastically with death.”
– Gail Clarke

“Like an earthquake, things shake until they are shattered. The very foundations shift, creating space where there was none, causing new mountains to rise, as plate gives way to tectonic plate. We are left to survey the damage, navigate the now alien terra firma, all the while trying our best not to wound ourselves in the wreckage. We move on from that place eventually, building on new foundations, praying every day that our worlds aren’t rocked yet again.”

I wrote this excerpt 10 months ago, 30,000 feet in the air, on my way to Barbados with my husband.

Writing has always been a major form of therapy for me. This particular piece allowed me to GO THERE and release emotions that I refused to tap into subsequent to my mother’s passing and allowed me to process my feelings in a way that I hadn’t before.

I spent most of that 3.5 hour flight lost in thought, reflecting on the loss of my mother and all of the memories I would never get a chance to share with her.

1. Like the time I got to groom Rick Fox for a photoshoot

2. Finding my lifetime love right in my back yard

3. Planning my wedding day:

and now this huge move that Wenrick, my husband, and I were making. The children she would never get a chance to spoil, and all of the advice I so desperately needed, but would never hear uttered in that sometimes rasping alto of hers.

My mother’s death has affected me in ways that I am still discovering. Even now, after 7 years, I teeter between being perfectly reconciled with the facts and wanting to curl up into a ball of self-pity, feeling robbed of time and memories.

There really is no handbook for dealing with death, and although we try our limited-human best to come up with anecdotes and ways to manage with our grief, there is no one-size fits all solution.

In my experience, time does not heal all wounds, but it certainly provides the distance we need to be able to look at things for what they are.

My mother was an AMAZING, larger-than-life woman, full of life, love and laughter. In my mind, she was legendary.  It would be an insult to her memory to spend the rest of my life parked at the intersection of her death, when there is so much more of her life to celebrate.

For those who have suffered the loss of your mother, and you don’t really know how to make it past this pain point – I don’t have the answers or pretty words for you. You never really get over it, you simply learn to celebrate the memories and cherish the moments that matter.

What I WILL tell you, is to take the moments as they come. Allow those feelings to surface. Cry, scream, rage, write! Do whatever you need to do to release those emotions. But don’t allow those moments to take you down. Don’t allow grief to trap you in its sad, hollow embrace. Because there is life after death. And life is for living.

What has helped you to process through the death of loved one?