My heart has been heavy with grief for longer than I can wrap my brain around and I have found myself asking “When does it get easier?”
After I lost my mom I can’t even begin to count the number of people that gave me the sympathetic head tilt while stating “I promise it gets easier” and “just give yourself time…grief is not linear.”
At the time those words felt comforting; they helped me know that feeling like a piece of my heart had been ripped out was normal, that crying every time there was silence was okay…and that perhaps…given time…
IT REALLY WOULD “GET EASIER”.
What I am beginning to realize is that I have been asking myself the wrong question. The questions isn’t “When does it get easier?” The question is
“Do I want it to get easier?”
It’s a hard question to answer. I’m afraid that if it gets easier it means I am letting her go. What I am realizing is that easier…doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.
I may cry every day for the rest of my life when a memory of my mom in those last moments pops into my head, and I may cry when I think of her laugh, the sound of her voice or the fact that I will never step into “HER” home again…but the tears are not the same as the day that she left us.
The tears in the beginning were gut wrenching…almost vomit inducing cries for someone to stop the pain; to reverse the clock.
The ability in our brain to shut out all logic and bargain for time to rewind so you can “fix” what you didn’t know needed to be fixed…change what you weren’t aware was coming…is heart breaking to say the least.
Even as you cry out and beg you know in the logical centers of your brain that it’s not possible…yet still we plead with the universe to rewind, to wake us up, to make reality unreal. Still we plead…from the depths of our souls…for some kind of miracle.
I have learned through this that I don’t want to let go or “manage” or “overcome” my grief. I want to hold on to it, to pull it close to my heart, to cherish it and feel it and let it in. I never want it to go away. I never want it to get smaller or easier or bare-able. Perhaps that sounds strange as I grip tightly to my mother’s blanket and hold on to the last pieces of her that are scattered through my home.
Maybe I would be told by therapists that I am not properly facing my grief; but for me…as I allow those tears to fall…
Those tiny drops of love I can no longer give directly to her…I remember how much I love her
It is in those moments as the tears wet my skin I know there is not a single piece of my love for her that has shrunk…and somehow…
I find the strength to take another step.
Surviving Life 
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