Grief

     Grief is a strange thing. You are going about your life and then suddenly this aching just slaps you in the face. I woke up recently with a strong desire to hear my mother play The Entertainer by Scott Joplin. It was my favorite piece to listen to her play, and she was usually willing to take requests, as long as she wasn't in the middle of rehearsing for a performance. 

    The thing is, when she passed her quality of life was already so diminished that even if she were still alive now I still wouldn't be able to listen to her playing such a complicated piece, if she were able to play anything at all. Everything that I miss the most about my mom was already gone before she died. 

    I distinctly remember visiting my parents for Easter two years before she passed. I was four or five months pregnant with my oldest and one night I just broke down sobbing to my husband because I realized that no matter how things progressed with my mom's health, no matter how long she lived, my children would never know the woman who'd raised me. She was already gone. That was a really hard realization. 

    Another strange thing about grief is that people have very strict ideas of what it looks like. I didn't really cry at my mother's funeral. I teared up while we were singing "Be Still, My Soul", but that was largely because some of my siblings were crying, not because of my personal feelings of loss, but for all the things my siblings had lost. Throughout the little meet and greet we had following the funeral I constantly felt like I had to justify my dry eyes. I made a comment that I wasn't super in touch with my emotions and the person whom I was speaking to replied, "I can tell." It was frustrating, because in reality I'd been mourning my mother for years prior to her death and that was why I was largely at peace with her passing. She'd already been a shell of herself, a constant, stinging reminder of who she'd been before excruciating chronic pain warped her mental state. However, there's not a good way to explain this to someone you're not close to at a funeral.

    I just find it very stupid that other people's grief is something that so many people feel entitled to comment on: how it's displayed, how long people talk about it, when or if they move on from it, and on and on. Unless someone's grief is genuinely dangerous to themselves or those around them (and I'm talking suicide, neglect, abuse) can we please just, as a society, shut up and support people how they ask to be supported. You don't know better than the person going through it. Stop acting like you do.