Dear quarantine stranger

I haven’t written anything in a month. I’ve been very busy, and frankly it’s been a nice break. It gave me some perspective on how I was feeling, and allowed me to move on from some of the grudges I was holding. The backlash of holding in my feelings hit me hard this week.

I didn’t even realize that I was hold in my anger and my sadness. I hadn’t taken the time to consistently meditate every night before going to sleep and I went back to my old habits of shoving down my emotions instinctively. Usually, meditation helps me ground myself and let go of all the negativity I stored during the day. I noticed that following through this simple tasks I have assigned myself to do every day was necessary. I recommend you do it too. I just lie down in the dark for ten to twenty minutes every night and I try to focus on my breathing, on the energy flowing through my body, and I let my thoughts run through my mind to see if they hold any of the emotions I carried through the day, and if so I try to release it. Of course, it seems easier writing it than actually doing it.

I have actually welcomed that break from my feelings, although I’m going to have to try to work on not swallowing down every single negative emotion. It was nice to have a break from feeling like shit. The last few months have been rough. It’s hard enough going through a major historic event, without having lost someone I love. 

Tomorrow, it will be six months since my mother passed away. So naturally, I have been feeling anxious. Life flies by so fast. It’s actually frightening. In half a year, I have done so much introspection. I feel like I’ve grown up so much. I have accomplished so much for my career, even though the pandemic slowed me down. Somehow I feel happier than I did before, because I have begun to figure myself out more. It makes me feel hopeful that I can still carry on with life after losing my mother. I am grieving but life doesn’t have to stand still, even though at first I wished it did. 

As expected celebrating Christmas with my family this year was not as joyful as intended. After testing everyone in the family, and our tests coming back negative for Covid, we gathered on the 25th for a long lunch with my father's parents, his brother and my aunt (his wife), my cousin, my father and my sister. Small committee. Everyone acted as if no one was missing from this family reunion, and for a few seconds during the day, it felt like everything was normal.

People say the holidays are hard for those who have lost members of their family, and it's true, it was, but it was easier than I thought it would be. It almost felt normal for her to not be here. As I'm writing this, though, I remember that every time I started to notice myself getting confortable with the idea of her absence, a wave of sadness swept me off my feet. So, maybe it wasn't as easy as I think. I just thought I wouldn't be able to go through the day without having some sort of breakdown.

The hardest part was opening the presents. It felt uncomfortable to have everyone cheer as they opened their gifts. I noticed that my sister didn't have as many as the years before, because it was probably my mother who bought her presents, and she seemed disappointed, which made me even sadder. The ones I received were nice, but I couldn't feel grateful because nothing came from my mother. I didn't get one of the special presents she usually finds for me. She would take time to find something I actually needed, and she would add something related to one of our private jokes in the wrapping paper, so not getting something similar this year was disappointing. I'm not trying to be ungrateful, because I am lucky that I even get to have presents, and a good meal, and I get to spend time with my family, but it's just not the same without her. Something just felt wrong.

There is no such thing for me as weakness, emotionally speaking. You can be physical weak if you can’t lift something up but I don’t think people are weak when it comes to emotions. You’re not weak for feeling overwhelmed. It’s alright to feel the way you do sometimes. It’s also okay if you feel overwhelmed most of the time. I think what’s important is learning to manage this feeling. We feel the way we do because our bodies/brains need to feel that way so I think it’s important to not feel too guilty about the way we feel and the way we act when we feel something. I understand it’s hard not to feel guilty especially when we think we should be more productive. I often feel the same way. I’ve learned to be kinder to myself by analyzing the situation : how do I feel? Why do I feel like that? What behavior are those feels creating? Can I change the way I’m acting right now or are my feelings taking over? Is there anything I can do right now to shift the way I’m feeling? If there isn’t then I try to accept the fact that today will be harder but that doesn’t mean other days will be as hard. Does that make sense?

We’ve been conditioned to think that we have to do something at all times, that productivity is the only thing that makes us feel alive but that’s not the truth. It’s okay to be lazy sonetimes. You will always have tomorrow to do the things you couldn’t do today. You can have lazy days, the most important thing is to not make a habit of it because it can impact your mental well being. Sometimes laziness is important because our bodies and our minds need rest.

I was scrolling through Instagram, as one does, and found a post about a woman dealing with the loss of her mother. Instantly, I clicked on “see more” to read the description on her post. I didn’t think I would relate that much but read on anyway. I thought it was going to be another feel-good post, that was going to annoy me but it was the opposite. So, for today’s post I will only post what she shared. Grief is not a linear process, it’s messy and complicated. It’s only been six months for me, and yet some days I feel like it’s been years and some days I feel like I was talking to her to day before. The only thing I know is that it will get easier as time goes by. 

She wrote :

“Just wanted to normalise the fact that numbness and disbelief are felt months and years after loss.

Some days you might wake up and your loss feels like a long time ago which carries it’s own pain of longing and guilt, other days it might feel like a crushing new reality. It might feel like you just got that call all over again. It really proves that time is just time. I will never accept my loss or ‘come to terms with it’ I might find elements of peace in my life, but my mum dying will always feel like it happened to me in an alternate reality and this is a nightmare I will wake up from. It will always feel unfair and sometimes not real.

Since my mother died, I’ve noticed that we are surrounded by death. I didn’t notice it before because it had never touched me so suddenly. My great grandmother died two years ago but I was prepared for it. She was 98 so, even though it was sad, it was also natural to see her go. With my mother, it was very much different. She died a month after her 50th birthday. This is not common for someone living in Europe in the 21st century...

Everywhere I go it seems I am reminded that death is part of life. I guess it’s normal because if one thing is certain about life, it’s that we all die in the end. Everyone will experience it eventually, it’s part of the natural process of life. However, I didn’t expect to be impacted so profoundly every time I watch, hear or read about it. 

I remember after she died, all I could see in the street were ads about cancer. Any type of cancer, you name it, there was some kind of prevention about it wherever I went. I thought it was some kind of cruel joke the universe was trying to pull on me. Then, when I scrolled through Netflix everything seemed related to either cancer, grief or the loss of a parent. It seemed absurd, and yet I watched all of these shows. I even started watching Grey’s Anatomy again, because it made me feel less alone in my grief. While it’s normal to see sick people in these kind of shows, because that’s the whole point of a medical show, I wasn’t expecting to see a character who had lost his wife to ovarian cancer just months after I had lost my mother to the same type of cancer. Was it the first time it was portrayed, or was it the first time I was noticing? I could really understand the word trigger now. As soon as that character spoke, I burst into tears because I could relate, but also because I couldn’t escape my mother’s death. 

I feel like we are all so disconnected from grief. We are so used to seeing wars, violence and death on TV, whether in the news, or in fiction. We’ve been desensitized to it. We even joke about it by saying “this killed me” or “i’m dying from laughter” or “i want to kill him/her/them” or “i’ll kill myself if this doesn’t happen”, as if it was some funny and light-hearted thing to experience. I understand that we joke about it as a way to get rid of the anxiety surrounding the subject, which is understandable. I joke about it too, but whenever we talk about it ironically, it makes a joke of the real experience. 

I'm sorry for bothering you with my rant

Hi, thank you for your message.  Please don’t apologize to me for sharing. I welcome any message that is sent to me. 

I am really sorry for your loss. I hope it’s easier to grieve now than it was before, although a year is not a lot so I hope you are okay. I completely understand you saying that you can’t fully grasp the fact they are gone. We are living in a really weird time right now and dealing with it without grief is hard enough, so I don’t know about you but dealing with it with grief is hell. It would have been easier to grieve without everything else happening. It would have been nice if time just stood still while we piece ourselves back together. Sometimes I like to imagine another world where my mother is still here, and I try to imagine how she would have reacted to me getting a new job or to the new book I bought, what type of advice she would have given me on certain things. It’s nice to pretend for a second that she is still here, and it helps a little. I’d like to think that she is. I don’t know if you believe in spirits/souls but I’d like to think she’s still here watching over me somehow. This might be weird but I talk to her sometimes before going to sleep. If someone saw me from the outside I would look like a crazy person talking to myself but I don’t care because it makes me feel better...

I also feel like this can’t be real, that I’m in a bad dream and once I wake up everything will be “normal” again. It’s hard to cope with the fact that someone can be here one day and gone the next. I know that how life works but whoever created it could have done things differently, right? 

During this last month, as I wrote about before, I went down a weird and depressing spiral where I was reliving my childhood traumas. It made me think about everything my parents did wrong, and it made me realize that I could blame them forever or just move on. It's hard to realize that your parents aren't perfect and that their flaws have impacted you forever. Unfortunately, that is how life works. We are touched forever by the actions of others. I would want to say that we can choose to absorb the positive and leave out the negative but that's not the truth.

As children, we are not equipped to understand that other people's behaviors can hurt you and that their behavior will trigger something in you for the next ten years. For me, it's hard to realize that neither my mother nor my father were perfect. The way they raised me and my sister was the best they could do, even though I wish they would have done better.

My sister has autism, so her behavior was sometimes hard to deal with. When we were kids, and as soon as she started talking in full sentences, she would be verbally abusive with me. She would always reject me and when she grew up she would sometimes insult me. Until five years ago (at 17), I never understood how much it affected me. I learned that, even though I knew she didn't mean to be insulting, her behavior scarred me. I isolated myself from my family because I didn't want to suffer the abuse and that was the easiest way I found to prevent it. I am talking about her because when she was aggressive my parents would try to defend me, and ask her to stop. My father, as always, would also be aggressive and yell at her to stop. His approach would obviously never work because my sister is very sensitive to loud noises, so he would scare her and she would cry. My mother tried to explain to her, gently, that her behavior was rude and that I wasn't there to hurt her or take her place but it didn't work either. In the end, we tried many things to get her to stop but nothing ever worked. That is, until I moved out of the house because I couldn't take it anymore. I wasn't ready but I did it anyway and it was a saving grace. Once I moved out, she stopped being aggressive and our relationship improved.

Now, at 22 years old, I feel resentful that my parents couldn't find a way to make her stop. I am furious that the only way I could get away from the situation was to literally get away. I feel guilty about being angry at my parents because overall I still had a nice childhood, if you disregard the abuse, and I still loved them. I feel disappointed and powerless at the fact that all of these emotions and realizations arose now instead of a few years ago, when I could have talked to my mother about it, and worked through it with her. Now, I only have my father to talk to and I don't want him to react aggressively when, and if, I talk to him about it. I don't want to judge him. I want him to understand that I was hurt by the way they chose to parent, and that when thought I am still hurt by it, I have learned to deal with it and moved on from it.

I have been having anxiety about the holidays. It’s almost Christmas, which will also be the six month « anniversary » of my mom’s death.

A month ago, I decided to take a break from social media because it made me procrastinate from work. I will continue to take this break because people are starting to talk about Christmas and family reunions. It’s hard because I wanted to be consistent in keeping this blog updated but its making me anxious to post... This writing project meant that I could talk about how I’m dealing with grief, so I could feel more aware about what I’m feeling. I also wanted it to help people who are feeling the same way. For the moment though, grief is kicking my ass and it’s keeping me from this blog.

It’s getting hard to realize that this will be the first holiday without my mom. It’s also bringing up a lot of emotions. Im still trying to figure out how I will fit into my family now that she isn’t here. She used to be my ally during family reunions. Now that she isn’t here it’s going to be hard.

The pandemic isn’t making things easier for me. I’m feeling hopeless for the future. It going to be weird to start a new year without my mom. We are going to move on. It feels so strange even writing it. Time is going by so fast but in my mind my mother was alive just a few days ago. It’s really troubling to feel like time is passing by and I’m stuck in the past. I hope these feelings will pass. I think eventually they will.