7 months

It's been seven months today since my mother died. Grief is strange and exhausting and at this point in my life it feels physically heavy.  I'm worn out by the end of the day from the effort of it all. Yes, I'm sure I'm depressed, but I'm trying to work through it.  I mean after all, my mother died - some sorrow/depression/melancholy seems appropriate, if not altogether fitting.  I made a comment to a close friend the other night that things really aren't that bad, most everyone goes through this sooner or later - losing a parent.  And she was kind enough to say, no, not everyone goes through this.  Not everyone loses a parent this way.

So, starting very close to the end of the story, going from the day of her death backwards, when someone you love (like your mother) has an illness like MS that lasts decades, you, as their daughter, get to watch their illness progress and their world contract. All of it happens slowly, but it happens. Relationships and mobility and her once sharp mind - all lost to MS.  In truth, it all changed so incrementally that there weren't big heartbreaking moments along the way.  Just a gradual loss. Of almost everything. Which is to say that nothing about my mother's MS ever seemed urgent.  It was chronic, ongoing, something to live with, but not urgent. Until it was, right at the end.  She was here, she was here, she was here - she was gone. Like spending twenty years walking down a hill wondering where the bottom was, then falling off a cliff. Boom. Over.

I've thought about finding a grief counselor, but I'm not sure that's the way for me.  I spent a few days with a palliative care team when my mother was in the hospital and they were wonderful and lovely and supportive, but I left every conversation feeling like I'd overshared, like I'd said too much.  I'm just not sure I'm a therapy person.  At least not right now.  But writing helps.  Getting things out of my head and down on paper so I can see how things are.  That helps.  Of course I also like to write things that people want to read and I'm not sure how many folks want to read about grief on a regular basis.  So maybe I'll write that closer to home, in a journal.  I do miss writing out loud though, where people can read it. But it takes courage and brainpower and the belief that I have something interesting to say.  Which is hard right now.

7 months without my mother. Grief is hard.