Grief Makes You Stupid

The phrase, “How are you doing?” seems so innocent, so simple, so straightforward.  It is until the answer is something other than “fine.”   I have learned this week, to say, “Not okay.” or “I don’t know.”  I wrote a piece about my mom but made it a page instead of a post.   So I wrote another page about my mom.  That too, was a page and not a post.  Grief makes you foggy, grief makes you stupid, and grief makes you go from what feels like ordinary to “Why does the air feel hard to walk through in a step?”  The page is still up, and one can surmise from my opening what has happened, but my mother died on her birthday, last Tuesday.

My grief is still raw, still probably in the shock component, though all the other stages have happened and keep happening too.  It seems mean to me to say at a Christmas party when people are talking about trips and pets and babies and vegetables, “My mom died this week.”  We were at an art museum where one display flashed in neon flamingo pink, “This moment was once the unimaginable future.”  I know damn well, I didn’t want to imagine this particular moment.

Folks were kind and I felt rather like a jerk but the words came out because the weight of it in the room was too much.  Normally, I love those parties, I love hearing stories and seeing the art and it feels adult and the food is pretty and the desserts, are fantastic.   We had a good time, but the weight remains.   The press of it remains.  Every once in a while, it’s just, “She’s gone.”

That’s the sigh of my heart.  I made it through fifteen minutes of blubbering with God in adoration, but it’s all I could manage.  Everything feels too close to the surface, too overwhelming.

Go to work, stay home, I’m not good at making decisions right now, it’s all impulse and feeling and that’s all I have.  Every emotion carries an edge with it. I laugh harder, I cry uglier, less and more patient, everything is a gift and I struggle to be present.   We all know there’s no one way to grieve.  For me, there’s only staggering through it like a drunk without having had a sip of alcohol.   I found it funny I lost my teacher’s ID the day my mom, my first teacher, who was also an educator, died.  (It’s been found since).   Every act requires deliberate focus and that is just missing.

Upon learning of my mother’s death, I joked, I should not be allowed to make big financial decisions, operate heavy machinery or put fingers to the keyboard for at least a week post-mortem.  We’ve done all three since because life goes on, even when we think everyone should stop.  There are still bills to pay, meals to make, repairs to organize, cleaning to be done, and errands.  In fact, there are more than before, because a thousand details that make up the sum total of a life must be sifted through, and the energy needed to manage Christmas, this army of my family and wrangle with Mom’s death, make for a larger than laundry list of things to address.

This past weekend, Spotify Wrapped dropped, and my daughters complained about their playlists having completely random moods one after another resulting in strange and hard-to-enjoy transitions from techno pop to classical to musical, with equally clashing tonal qualities.   Grief works the same way.  You must go through all of it.  There will be nice moments, but they will be jammed up against each other and you don’t want to go through it again.    Courteous of AI and the online music giant coming together and creating such an unintended perfect metaphor for the mishmash that is my heart right now.

So I ask for people to pray for me, my family, and my mom’s soul.  I pray she did not suffer long before she passed, and live in hope, she enjoys looking into the face of God with unbridled joy, and holding my dad’s hand.   Our hearts are made up of all those we love.  Two chambers of my heart are now not here.

Love you Mom.