I had another dream about my mom last night. She appeared how she did before chemo, but after she had had her leg amputated. She had long hair - to her shoulders - and a big smile. she was on crutches and was walking with a group of other women, my grandmother (who passed when i was 10) included. It was near christmastime and she was feeling sassy as she sometimes did. She had survived christmas in 2007 to be with us for this Christmas and I was relieved and so happy that she was such a strong survivor and I believed that she could continue to survive. I was so happy to see her alive. And then I woke up. And of course those feelings from my dream faded with the reality of her death.
But despite distress upon waking, I am happy to have dreamed of her, to have seen her in my dream is to have been in her presence — when I dream of my mother, my image of her is so vivid, so much more vivid then in my memories, that it is a relief to have them. It is closer to being in her presence then anything else ever will be. So this morning I feel blessed to have seen my mother’s smile last night, blessed to have seen her with my grandmother, blessed to have felt the force of her spirit near me.
The 17th of January marked one year since my mother’s passing. Everyone told me that the first year after a loss was the hardest, that the pain fades and the grieving gets easier. So I expected that, after getting through the holidays and the first anniversary of her death, grieving my mother would indeed get easier with time. But this is not the case.
Grieving isn’t something that runs its course all on its own, it’s a project that one has to devote time to. I suspect that for the greater part of this last year I was in shock, experiencing the requisite sorrow and pain, but feeling distanced from memories and thoughts of my mother in a way that protected me from the pain. And indeed I even suffered memory loss - unable to remember specifics about the month surrounding my mother’s death and the few years preceding. Now, as the shock wears off and my memories come flooding back to me I find that the pain of loss is again as intense as the first day I lost her. I expected that the grief would run its course all on its own, that whatever I instinctively did to deal with it would be the best thing to do. But it doesn’t run its own course, it can hide from you sometimes and then jump out to surprise you when you least expect.
When recovering from grief it’s necessary to confront it, to be certain that you are not trying to escape it or allowing it to become burried. After I got married (about 6 months after my mother’s passing) and moved to France, far away from the objects and spaces that are imbued with my mother’s memory and spirit, it was easy for me to focus on other things, to distract myself from grief. I could even imagine that she was at home waiting for me. But when I returned home from Paris for the holidays, i was struck by my mother’s things, literally feeling as if slapped in the face, by her unmistakable presence in my parental home. The loss was made real to me all over again and I grieved like I did the first few weeks after her death.
Now I’m back in Paris and once again able to ignore the grief if I choose. Only now I know that it’s there whether I pay attention to it or not. If I try to ignore it, as I did this past fall, it’ll only come back to slap me again in the future (Hope Edelman attests to this in her book Motherless Daughters). So I need to force myself to deal with the grief, to continue to grieve despite my compulsion to avoid the pain.
To actively work on grieving I have begun to keep a journal of memories of my mother, writing down sketches of the past as they come to me, to force myself to remember and to ensure that I will ALWAYS remember. I have also begun to look into books which discuss grieving and how to work through the loss, make peace with it.
It’s necessary to feel the pain in order to heal, no matter how unbearable and gut-wrenching it may be. You have to let yourself know the loss and embrace it as a part of you and, like a bad roommate, you just have to learn to live with it no matter how miserable it may be. And one hopes, eventually, that the loss will improve, will lessen, and you’ll incorporate it into a new version of you - it will meld to you and change you and despite its constant presence you may find peace.