The best way I can explain it is like this: you’re walking alone in complete darkness when all of a sudden you fall into a deep pit. So you’re just lying there deeper in darkness with the wind utterly knocked out of you, unable to move because your leg is pinned under some giant rock; and you don’t even know how you got here, or which way is up. You’ve never been in this type of situation before but now your continued survival depends upon your ability to dig yourself out of this trench. But not just yet. First you need the signal to travel from your body to your brain that you are indeed trapped. It can take awhile, ages even, like when you stub your toe and don’t even feel it for a few seconds. And even if you do start to feel it, it can take a great deal of time to motivate yourself to do anything about it. 

Who knows? Maybe the darkness and isolation is comforting for the moment, like a big black blanket that will suffocate you if you let it. And you can feel powerless and confused and frightened and overwhelmed and alone, or nothing at all…but here’s the thing: you will survive. No matter how bad things get, no matter how beaten and broken you feel on the inside, you won’t physically disappear. It’s oddly comforting. You realize how remarkably resilient human beings can be in the face of personal tragedy. Yes, you will survive. Now that we have that one motivational point out of the way, let’s get into all the ways this survival can be cruel, brutal, impossible, beautiful, frightening, and necessary.

Here you are: the moment itself. The one you always knew would come someday in an abstract sense, but which you never actually considered having to face in reality. “Yes, my mom will die just as I and everyone on this planet will eventually pass, but not until essentially forever from now; so no need to ever worry about it!” It’s impossible to reconcile the image in your head of your mother as a strong and nurturing protector with the frail, fading and empty body lying in front of you now. Outwardly you’re crying, but inside you’re numb. How odd and terrifying that at moments when it seems like you should be feeling everything, you actually feel nothing. Maybe it’s a self-preservation instinct. You just go into survival mode to make it to the next moment. Your brain’s like, “Ok this is horrifying, let’s just focus on breathing and blinking and swallowing so that this doesn’t scar us forever…whoops, too late!”

You thought you’d prepared for this. After all, if your parent is sick, then you really begin to mourn them while they’re still here. You’re forced to come to grips with their potential absence before they’re even truly gone. And then you feel morbid for considering their death, as though imagining the worst somehow wills it into being. How dare you be so pessimistic and negative? Other people die of cancer. Other people don’t make it. Your family will survive because you have to, because that’s always been the story you’ve told yourself about how your life will go. You’ll grow up, go to college, move to “the city”, get an exciting job, meet an exciting partner, have children of your own, and live a fulfilling life, all while your mom and dad look on proudly. This right here – your mom dying in front of your very own eyes when your life is already at its most uncertain point – this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. 

Same goes if you were estranged from your parent before they died. You already know what life without them feels like; thus the change won’t be as jarring. What will be jarring will be those times when you’re going about your everyday routine feeling comfortable without them around as you had when you simply weren’t talking, only to suddenly remember that they’re not just out of your life, but out of the living world in general.

When it’s fresh, unsettling thoughts start to invade your mind. You think to yourself the day after the worst happens something like, “her body is lying in one of those refrigerated drawers along with a bunch of other bodies in the cold, clinical, unforgiving, forgotten and lonely wilderness that is the hospital basement. She’s about to be cremated in the pine box she’d so spitefully asked for in her final days…at least her tumors will be burnt up too. That’s what I don’t get: cancer’s main goal is to take over and kill everything, yet if it’s truly successful it will kill itself…that kind of twisted logic is pretty much all the proof I need that there’s no God. Or if there is he’s one twisted sadistic fuck.”

Good thing you don’t have much time to linger on those terrifying thoughts, because you have logistics to deal with. Lots and lots of logistics. You’ll be forced to contend with the complicated mechanics of death just as you’re thrown into the lion pit that is the grieving process. You’ll have to deal with lawyers, morticians, family members, banks, cell phone and credit card companies, all while the wounds are still fresh. You never thought you’d have to call and cancel your dead mom’s water delivery service, but then again, you never really thought you’d have a dead mom. At least you’ll get a bizarre kick out of seeing TSA seize your mother’s ashes in airport security to test them for traces of illegal narcotics.

It never really seems to end either. You’ll still be dealing with paperwork (their estate/will, lawyers, taxes, what have you) long after they’re gone. It’s an oddly clinical form of immortality. The cold bureaucratic legacy of a person outlasts so much: their flesh and blood, personality, quirks, everything that you’d thought made them them. They’re just a name on a form now: a fading memory that only seems to slip away faster the more desperately you try to cling to it.

Oddly enough, you’ll lean into these multitudinous administrative tasks. They’ll help you make sense of day-to-day life despite their unpleasantness, or perhaps because of it. They’ll make you feel useful and semi-normal. Otherwise your body and mind would become a shoreline for unrelenting waves of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression (with nary an acceptance in sight) to crash into. No one tells you this, but there’s actually no set, discernible order to the “stages of grief”, nor is there really an “other side” as far as you can see. Rather you go through shorter and longer phases of each emotion, sometimes experiencing all at once on your drive home from work. You’ll even out eventually, but the grief will always be there in some form, just waiting under the surface to overtake you at the most random and inopportune moments.

Another deeply unpleasant task you’ll have to face will be how to break the news to your wider community. You’ll want friends, family and coworkers to understand why when your behavior  inevitably changes, both for the better and the worse. And simultaneously, you’ll want to avoid that unbearable face people inevitably make when you tell them in person. You know the one: a mix of pity, empathy (if you’re lucky), and strong undertones of discomfort and bewilderment. The prospect of facing that face and the inevitable accompanying stuttered condolences many times over is too exhausting to bear. Plus it’s such a bizarre concept, like how do you just squeeze that into conversation? “Hey how’s it going?” “Oh pretty chill except for the fact that my mom died.” Yeahhh, didn’t think so. And so you find yourself considering something that was previously unthinkable: a sappy social media post broadcasting your parent’s demise. Composing that in itself is a mindfuck and a half; but at least it will tell people when you don’t have the strength to tell them yourself.

Congratulations, you have officially opened the floodgates to a sea of condolence messages from all manner of close friends and acquaintances. Long heartfelt messages from people who have been there. Cookie cutter responses from people who don’t know what the fuck to say, but want you to know you’re in their thoughts. Clueless and odd messages from people who want to show they care in a different way from the cookie cutter folk. So many messages, so little actual human contact unless you actively seek it out yourself. It will surprise you the people who reach out; it will surprise you even more the people who don’t. 

You don’t know what else to say, so you just respond to every single message long and short with the automatic “thanks, it means a lot.” It’s funny, isn’t it? They don’t know what to say, you don’t know what to say, nobody knows what to say! We on the whole are just so damn bad at talking about death, and dealing with it publicly. We’re never really taught how and thus we live in this endless cycle of “thoughts and prayers” that is ultimately meaningless. Sharing your true thoughts and feelings just seems too vulnerable. There are so many potentially inappropriate or triggering things to say, it’s like stepping into a conversational minefield. And so to be safe, you stick to the socially prescribed but ultimately empty platitudes, and feel shitty for once again not rocking the boat. 

Of course, your sappy social media post won’t reach everyone. And so even years on you’ll find yourself in the awkward position of having to figure out how to respond when the cheerful guy at your local dry cleaner asks in a well-meaning but oblivious way, “How’s your mom doing, by the way?” You had to have known this sort of situation would come up eventually, so why are you so stumped right now? You don’t want to dampen this otherwise positive interaction, or make the guy feel uncomfortable. So much consideration for other people’s feelings, so little consideration for your own. You don’t want to lie either, yet for some inexplicable reason you find the word “Fine!” pouring out of your mouth before you can stop it. You go about the rest of your day trying and failing to explain that bizarre impulse to yourself. It never ends. 

There will come a time when the condolence messages and well-wishes cease completely. In a cruel twist of fate, it will only be around this time that you truly start to process your loss in even the most miniscule ways. On a related note, you get the distinct impression that you have an unofficial license to be a selfish asshole for awhile after your loss. But it feels like an hourglass, the sands aggressively slipping closer to the day when everyone wordlessly agrees everything (including you) should go back to normal. But what if you don’t take advantage of that time when you have it? What if you want to pretend everything’s normal in order to feel a bit more normal, only to finally feel the urge to act out once the hourglass has run out? What if everything still feels overwhelming months if not years on? Is that ok? Or have you failed in some way?

You’ll avoid friends and activities you used to love, even though they’d probably be good for you, just because what’s the point? Suddenly the things you and your friends used to talk about, the guy troubles, work complaints, discussion of whatever released on Netflix the weekend before, all starts feels so trivial and insignificant when you know you’ll meet your end someday, perhaps in an even more grueling and untimely fashion than your parent did. So why bother? The grieving process is filled with so many negative emotions and behaviors; it’s a marvel anyone stays by your side even as you try your hardest to push them away. Some friendships will wither and die (or explode in a spectacular fashion), while others (perhaps the ones you least expected) will go stronger. When all is said and done you’ll have fewer people standing by your side than you did before; but the people remaining will truly care about you.

It’ll strike you at first how little everything matters, which will give way to you realizing just how much every little thing can matter, if you let it. And you should. You feel an urge to live harder than you ever have before. After being around death you need to swing the complete opposite direction to temporarily forget about your own mortality. After all, you remind yourself, your mother retired at 62 after decades of work at a job she didn’t like in order to travel the world and finally start living life the way she’d always wanted to live it, only to be diagnosed with a rare form of cancer just a few months later. Goddamn, you need to quit your job and write your semi-autobiographical screenplay. You need to sell all your possessions and move to Paris. You need to become a marine biologist or a National Geographic photographer because if you don’t do it now you never will and then you’ll die never having learned anything about whales. You need to disappear into the forest and emerge an entirely new person: a confident person who knows just how little time we all have left, who goes for what they want, who lives life to the fucking fullest. 

But then the next day you’ll revel in the comforting familiarity of your routine. And then you’ll vacillate back and forth between comfort in routine and intense desire to break with routine so much that you’ll end up standing stock still, your heart pounding in your head. There are lots of vacillations to grief, actually. Vacillation between a desire for disruption and a desire for familiarity. A desire to work hard and a desire to say fuck it all. A desire to withdraw from the world and a desperate, clawing desire for human connection. Shorter and shorter creative bursts followed by long droughts of inspiration. You can barely come to terms with your own thoughts, let alone explain them to anyone else. 

One day you’ll be going about your regular routine and will come to the horrifying realization that you feel spontaneously happy, whether it be in the form of laughing at a joke, appreciating the sunshine outside, or otherwise taking an involuntary momentary respite from the usual performance of grief. And you’ll absolutely detest yourself for it. Almost immediately a loud insistent voice will chime in: how dare you?? How dare you feel happy, content, optimistic, or anything good right now? It almost feels like an insult to your parent’s memory. Like if you can feel even the slightest bit good this soon after their death, then you must not have loved them enough. You must not have been a good enough daughter. You must be a callous psychopathic robot. 

But it’s imperative to tell that toxic voice to shut the fuck up. You need to bask in those moments, truly live in them, because they will save you in the end. You need to continuously have something, anything, to look forward to: a concert, a weekend trip, your morning cup of coffee, the new episode of The Good Place, a slice of pie from your favorite bakery. These are the lights that, when strung together, will guide you out of that trench, and potentially out of the darkness completely. You were limping, and each new quiet happy moment kept you from falling. Eventually you’ll look around and realize you’re walking on your own, limp-free. Maybe it’s only temporary, but you’ll take it for now.

As time goes on you’ll start to feel like you’re forgetting them bit by bit: what their voice sounded like, what their laugh sounded like, how they smelled. You grasp frantically at any little piece of them: a high school ring, a burberry scarf, affirmation journals. You collect these little fragments of a life, little nuggets of information, and desperately try to fit them together into a complete jigsaw puzzle of a person, only to find that the deeper you search, the more complex the mystery becomes. You wish like hell you knew more about the “real” them: their thoughts, their dreams, their sense of self. You have to come to terms that you’ll never know them, not really. 

Important sidebar: You want to really try to get to know your parent before they’re gone? Confront them? Forgive them? Ask them tough but necessary questions? Tell them you love them? Do not wait until near the end. It is absolutely nothing like how it looks in movies and TV, where the protagonist gets to tearfully wrap things into a neat little bow as their loved one passes into an unfortunate but beautiful and peaceful eternal slumber. Or maybe it is for some lucky fucks; but the rest of us have to deal with some pretty horrifying realities. 

For instance, my mother had a tumor taking up most of her abdomen, which meant that she couldn’t eat for the last week of her life. So she was both dying of cancer AND starving to death. When she wasn’t zonked out on extremely necessary high octane pain medication, she was begging for more pain medication or hallucinating out of hunger. All this is to say that once it was clear she was dying, she wasn’t at all lucid and it was too late for me to have any sort of real conversation with her other than to agree that yes, the remote control on her hospital bed did indeed resemble a giant penis. Don’t be stuck like me wondering what if; talk to your sick loved ones while they’re still lucid. Yes, it will feel morbid to have that “big final talk” when there’s still a chance they could get better. But it will feel even worse to never do it at all and always have those feelings stuck inside or only shout them into the void of a barely trafficked blog instead of conveying them to their intended recipient. End sidebar.

After you lose someone close to you, the once innocuous Google Photos becomes your worst enemy: a perennial stabbing reminder of your grief. Think you’re going to have a perfectly average morning at your desk of sipping coffee and responding to emails? Think again. “Rediscover this exact day from three years ago when your mom was still alive. Look at you both laughing and smiling, enjoying all the wonders of a famous steak-frites restaurant in Paris. Think about how fickle time is, how much and how little has changed since then. All that stands between your present self and your past self laughing with your mom is time. Time and disease. Rediscover this day, rediscover your grief, rediscover it, damn you!” Even if ghosts aren’t real, social media makes it so that we will perennially be haunted by memories of lost loved ones.

Anniversaries are supposed to be joyous occasions: a remembrance of some beautiful life event from the past. But now your calendar is flooded with horrible anniversaries. The anniversary of the time she ended up in the hospital with kidney failure. The anniversary of her telling you the cancer had spread. The anniversary of her death, which cruelly followed her birthday by only a few measly days. Honestly fuck anniversaries.

Similarly, holidays become potential landmines for you. On Mother’s Day you lock yourself in an emotional bunker to avoid the carnage that cheerful Instagram pics with impossibly bright, gratitude-filled captions can cause. You can’t go out in public on this most dangerous of Sundays lest you run the risk of running into mother-daughter daughter pairs enjoying each other’s living, breathing presence, which could be enough to cause you to break down. Hell, you can’t even check your email since it will be filled with Mother’s Day promotions. Jesus fucking Christ, can’t Origins do their research before throwing an emotional grenade into your inbox? There is no escape anywhere, anywhere. 

When you lose something great in your life, it doesn’t really sink in how much you’ve lost until you get a taste of it again. You almost forget how good you had it, out of self-preservation or a natural process of time moving forward or what have you. But then you get that taste and it just fucking wrecks you. Like when your sister out of nowhere gives you a back scratch during a quiet moment on some trip you’re on together. You’d remembered how transcendentally  comforting back scratches from your mom had felt, but then again you can’t tactilely feel a memory. It’s that familiar physical touch that instantly sends the memories and buried feelings flooding back. You feel incredible and terrible all at once, reveling in this intimate experience all while mourning the fact that you’ll never get a back scratch from your mom again. 

So um, in case the preceding paragraph (and this entire essay really) didn’t make it abundantly clear, whenever I’ve referred to “you” in the second person throughout this piece, I’ve really been addressing myself. I want my past self to be ready for the mountains of shit and personal growth ahead. I want my present self to make sense of the tangled mess of emotions she’s feeling. And I want my future self to never forget the lessons of this process, though I know I’m only just starting out on a journey that has no real destination. I can’t really address you the reader or provide a step-by-step how-to guide for grieving a lost parent, because everyone’s experience is different. All I can do is share what I’ve been through, and hope it helps in even an infinitesimal way. 

My mom is dead. I’ll never see her again, never hear her voice again, never get another back scratch again, never hear her sing “Hukilau” again, never make her proud again, never travel with her again, the list goes on and on. Never never never. Never. When you say it out loud it’s frankly ridiculous. Absurd. Makes no sense.

Yes, my mother is gone from my life forever. She died during an otherwise very uncertain time in my life, when I’d been eating nothing but shit and was only just starting to get my bearings. Because of this, my mom will never get to congratulate me on an important promotion. She’ll never get to meet and befriend a long-term significant other. She’ll never get to look on as I explore this world and my place in it. I know that she ultimately had faith in my potential (even though she had a funny way of showing it sometimes); but it absolutely guts me to think that she’ll never get to watch me soar.

Similarly, I won’t have her to lean on when I take a wrong step, am hurt, or otherwise fail spectacularly. Instead, I’ll have to find that strength, that celebration, that consolation in myself. It will always feel a little more hollow, but it’s the best I’ve got for now and perhaps forever.

 I don’t know if I’m strong enough to go through what she did. Am I willing to withstand that amount of pain, nausea, starvation, fever, infection, all while not knowing if there will be another side to all this? What’s the point of the suffering? Why go through it? Is human consciousness worth that much? I just don’t know if I could do it. Does that make me weak? Selfish? Cowardly? All of the above?

Then again, when I was younger I never thought I’d pass a Physics class. I never thought I’d learn how to drive or balance a checkbook or live on my own. But I’ve somehow managed to do all those things and more, simply by continuing to exist and adapt as I grow older. Similarly, but in a sadder way, I never thought I’d be able to live without my loved ones. My mom is dead, yet I’m still here. As far as I know it hasn’t irrevocably fucked me up to the point where I can no longer be a productive member of society. I’m still me. I’m still here. And I’ll continue to be here. I keep surviving all these things I never thought I’d be able to endure. Maybe I’ll just keep on surviving until something finally beats me in the end. Maybe that’s all there is to it. 

I am still in the darkness. I am still afraid of future stumbles. But I’ve dug myself out of the trench. And I believe I can do it again.