Pre-Grief

A long time ago, some smarty pants identified five stages to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These different stages enlist different feelings from the unfortunate person going through it - feelings of shock, guilt, sadness, anger, anxiety and fear. But the grief that comes with losing a loved one, well it’s not as simple as just making your way through five steps.

Grief is like… what exactly? It gets inside of you and makes you want to explode until it comes out. And when it does, it’s in sudden bursts that arise at the least opportune or inappropriate moments.

I am deeply unprepared to deal with the grief of losing you. I don’t want to – I don’t want to truly admit to myself that you are gone. And because of that, I am stuck in a place of in-between. A purgatory of pain that has left me numb and void of feelings. It’s not even that I am in denial – I haven’t even made it there yet. I just don’t know how to process it.

I have yet to break down. I haven’t cried the big, ugly tears that I have been waiting for. But I know they are there… building up, creating a tsunami of emotions that will eventually knock me into this awful, gut-wrenching reality.

A reality in which I am left to make my way back into normal, everyday life except now, nothing is normal. Everything around me remains the same… same house, same job, same commute to work. Same bills and the same responsibilities. But nothing is the same. Every day, every breath is weighed down by this immense sadness. By an overwhelming cloud of heartbreak that doesn’t let up and doesn’t care that I still need to get on with my life, but I have no idea how.

So, I just don’t. My head and my heart know that you are gone. But I don’t know how to process it. I don’t know how to begin grieving. Instead I just simply avoid it.

Everyone keeps telling me to find peace with the fact that you are no longer in pain. That you’re in a better place and that you will always be with me – but if that’s true, why do I still feel so incredibly alone? Why does it feel like I’m drowning in a bottomless pit of sadness? I don’t feel normal. My mom is gone.

Every few days I will get a text from friends or family asking how I am. Checking in to make sure I am “doing OK.” It means so much – that they care. That they want me to be OK… but sometimes I just want to scream and yell, of course I am NOT OK. I want you back. End of story. I want you back so bad that I don’t even want to begin grieving… because that means there is still so much pain left to come. And I’m not ready.

Waking up in a world without you in it is unimaginable. Since the day you were diagnosed with cancer, I never thought for a second that you wouldn’t survive. That you would ever leave me. That I would be left here, an empty shell of a girl who was robbed of so many years of laughter and love with the woman who gave me life and purpose.

To people who haven’t experienced a loss of such magnitude, of someone so important, these words may seem melodramatic and over-the-top. And I get that. Some days my emotions feel so extreme that I tell myself to buck up. To put a smile on my face and remember how blessed I was to have (almost) 32 amazing years with you. But then I think about your goofy laugh and all our silly conversations about nothing and I am reminded of how much I miss you… and I end up right back where I started. One step forward, ten steps back.

I don’t know how to do grief right. I know it will come, but I am not ready to accept it.

Because I miss you too damn much.