The Year After...

​“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love.
It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest.
Grief is just love with no place to go.”
-Jamie Anderson

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The last time I wrote about grief my partner had lost their closest grandma, aunt, and great aunt in the span of three months. One after another. Happening in threes as the saying goes.

​This time I write about grief, it’s around the anniversary of my mom's death. These past three years have been very hard in our lives, but this last year just tore me to shreds and left me more lost than a navigation system.

The process has been..well.. a process. Frankly I haven’t been able to continue with life the way I used to. All the things about "being optimistic" and "seeing the beautiful" that I ever learned about life I learned through my mother, and now with her absence I can’t seem to find the silver linings in the clouds anymore.

I still stand by what I wrote before about death itself being easy. I’m not really sure if death was easy for my mom because as much as I tried to stay awake by her side, the long sleepless nights took over and I fell asleep. I woke up to my brother trying to wake her up as her blue eyes stared in my direction.

I still remember thinking to myself how my mom’s body wasn’t my mom and how her soul/spirit/or whatever you’d like to call it had departed. How easy is it to disassociate when you realize all that a person ever was, is the soul behind the eyes. Once that soul is gone the life that was once there is gone as well and you realise that is was all that ever was.

Going through the grief process now I can definitely say with certainty that what plagues my mornings and my nights is the coulda-shouldas. The years I wasted chasing the wrong things or wrong people. The numerous times I wasted being a petulant spoiled brat. The opportunity’s missed. The days lost. The coulda-shouldas.

I think that my description of grief would be just like this: Grief is regret of the possibilities that will forever be absent in one’s life all the while the love that still exists has no where else to go except through tears of desperate pleas for one more time to say “I love you”. 

The three most basic words any being ever wants to hear with the most honest and pure energy ever felt.

It’s been a year but each day feels like eternity of loss. I once heard a saying from Nelson Mandela telling Oprah Winfrey about “the legacy you leave behind are the peoples lives you have touched.”

How fortunate was I to be created and raised by a mother who understood life and did her best to show me every aspect of it. I hope during the course of this transitioning moment in my life I can show people through her work just how special she is, or rather was. 

I took all her work and compiled it, but I think I’ll never reach the years with the amount of work she has. She was a beautiful soul she was my light in life, I just hope she still shines ever so brightly in spirit.

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