Seventeen years

Some things that help me feel less alone in my grief

Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. This month, I’m planning essays on writing about trauma and building a social enterprise. This edition is about the anniversary of my mother’s death. 

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Sunday was the 17th anniversary of my mother’s death. It’s always a difficult day. 

There’s something about the summer evening light, the last stretch of warm weather. Mam’s anniversary coincides with a public holiday in Ireland, so people are usually out enjoying themselves while I can’t find my way out of a bottomless despair.

Every year, I say I’ll write about her anniversary and every year, I find it too difficult to. I get through the hard days and don’t want to go back and re-experience those feelings on the page. But there’s something dishonest about that. I nurse my pain privately, and share it only when I’ve found my way to the other side. Part of this feels rooted in having good boundaries as a writer; I’m mindful of what I expect the reader to hold. But another part is fear. I don’t want to feel my pain. I don’t want to face it. 

Some of my hesitation in sharing this is rooted in the things people have said about “getting over it”. Those comments likely stemmed from their own discomfort with my grief, but they’ve stayed with me. For years, I felt contagious. Like I should be kept away from other people so I didn’t infect them with my pain. 

It feels a bit silly to be so deeply impacted by her anniversary. She’s not any more dead on August 4th, than she is on any other day.

But, the body remembers. Every anniversary echoes with that traumatic Saturday night, when I was washing dishes and she was taking her last breaths on the side of a country road. Every year, it aches with fresh agony. 

In Celtic Spirituality, there’s a concept known as ‘thin places’, where the line between the physical and spiritual worlds is flimsy and porous. Ancient Celtic sites of worship are thin places. Celtic scholars believe those locations are portals to the divine. I think thin places also exist within us. They are those moments where the boundary between the past and the present becomes blurred, where the veil briefly retracts and offers us a glimpse of another world. Every year, Mam’s anniversary feels like a ‘thin place’. For a few days, the line between then and now becomes almost invisible. 

It was a painful weekend. I did what I always do when things are hard. I read. I watched the Olympics. I tried not to isolate myself. I made a vegan bolognese and took long walks. 

During one of those walks, I bought a Snickers ice-cream and enjoyed it in the warm summer rain. Mam loved Snickers ice-creams. They were her favourite. I’d been looking for one all summer, but this was the first one I found. I wished she could have had one too, but her taste buds have long since turned to dust. She doesn't exist anymore. I have some of her things, but her body, the place she used to live, the things she used to love have all been wiped away.

Sad but smiling with my Snickers ice-cream

Every year, there’s a new flavour of grief. Every year, there’s something new to cry about and long for. Soon, she will have been dead longer than she was part of my life. Grief is never linear. It’s a sly fucker that takes a little more each year. I still sometimes feel a primal urge to scream for her, a biological longing for this person I adored. I crave her love. I know I’ll never be loved that way again. There’s nothing like a mother’s love. 

“I’m here for you”, my partner said kindly during another of our walks. I’m so lucky to have her, but I felt so desperately alone inside my despair. It was impossible to convey, like I’d fallen deeply inside myself and needed time to pass before I could find my way out.

Each year, I hope it will be better but it never is. At this point, I’ve got seventeen examples of how difficult it might be: the year I was working overseas and found myself unable to speak on the anniversary of her death. The year I went to the posh cafe, and buried my feelings under french pastries. The year I tried to work through it and ended up sobbing instead. I wonder if it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that I expect myself to tumble into a deep but fleeting despair and so, I always do. Whether it is or not, it is one of the most painful days of my year. 

But it passed. I tried to give myself some grace. I resented it (“I don’t have time for this!”), but I had to do it. I could end this essay with a primal scream of longing. That feels like the most apt conclusion. But instead, I wanted to share some of the things that have helped me feel less alone in my raw, animal grief. 

I hope you find some solace and comfort here. 

Dead Mom Essays

 The Love of my Life by Cheryl Strayed

“The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.”

The Unmothered by Ruth Margalit  

“A year later, my diary reads, “Hardest thing: overhearing colleagues tell their mothers ‘Love you’ on the phone. So casually.”

My Mother is Gone, But Her Edits Remain by Blair Hurley

“I still can’t draw a line between where her voice is speaking to me, and where I learn to speak.”

This is a Dead Mom Essay, by Maddie

“We were out running errands last week, and three days later, she was dead!”

The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O'Rourke

“The other morning I looked at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail from my mother. At last! I thought. I’ve missed her so much. Then I caught myself. The e-mail couldn’t be from my mother. My mother died a month ago.”

Matricide by Meghan Daum

(I couldn’t find it online, but it’s in her book The Unspeakable)

Dead Mom Books

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman (I didn’t read the whole book but the first chunk of it was comforting to my newly bereaved self)

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, which was excerpted in The New Yorker:

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.” 

I also enjoyed her interview on the Death, Sex & Money podcast.

Dead Mom Poems

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (including two poems from the collection: Theology and Snow Theory)

When All the Others were Away at Mass by Seamus Heaney

Marge Piercy’s The Day My Mother Died and My Mother’s Body.

Other Dead Mom resources: 

Stepmom, especially this scene.

Wild - the movie

‘This Is Too Mother You’ by Sinead O Connor

A Dead Moms Club Reading List

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💬 What have I forgotten? Please share your thoughts, feelings and Dead Mom Resources in the comments. 

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