My father’s death was a whirlwind, just two weeks from diagnosis to death. That’s how it was with his pancreatic cancer.
My mother’s death was very different. She had vascular dementia, and when she died, it was the culmination of months of not sleeping, hallucinations, and a mini-stroke, followed by an eerie return to herself. I didn’t know it then, but it’s called terminal lucidity, a rare, poorly understood phenomenon in which a person with advanced dementia experiences a brief period of unexpected mental clarity shortly before death. All I knew was that my mother was herself, not someone with dementia. During that time, she thanked me and told me she loved me, that she was leaving, and that I would go on. In true mom fashion, she even told me how she wanted me to wear my hair at her funeral. It was surreal to me then. Now I see it as a gift.
I thought I was prepared. By then I had already experienced the deaths of all 17 of my aunts and uncles, their spouses, and most of my parents’ many friends who felt like family to me. Surely I was better prepared than I had been with my father. After he died, I visited the cemetery every day and sat there for hours. It was the one place where I felt close to him.
But when my mother died, I was shattered. I couldn’t think clearly. I still couldn’t sleep even though I wasn’t “on call” anymore. I had been her caregiver for twelve years, and my daily thoughts, actions, even my schedule had revolved around her. That kind of love and dedication doesn’t end just because the person is gone. I was lost. I didn’t know who I was without her.
Months later, I learned why I felt this way. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, psychologist and grief researcher, writes in her book, The Grieving Brain, that our brains build a shared sense of “we” with the people closest to us. When she joined me on Daughterhood the Podcast, she added that “the word daughter implies two people.” When one of them is gone, the brain registers it as losing a part of itself.
That made so much sense to me. It made me realize that, all those years earlier, I had thought the problem was me. I thought I was doing something wrong with my grief. When my father died, I assumed my youth and inexperience were what made it hard. He died five days before my 17th birthday, and his funeral was the day before. But all the losses that came after hadn’t made my mother’s death any easier, and now I understood why. Each loss took away a different “we,” and experience didn’t change that.
In those first few months after my mother’s funeral, my grief showed up as isolation. I was so burned out and traumatized that it felt like living in a haze of dizziness and exhaustion. My body wanted to move, but my legs felt disjointed and unstable. I walked in circles in my driveway because I didn’t think I had the strength to go any distance and still make it home. I spoke only with my husband, my children, and the other daughters in my Daughterhood circle. With them, I never had to explain. I texted with everyone else because I had no interest in “regular” conversation.
I watched only TV shows I already knew: old favorites like Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart that I had seen a thousand times. I knew how every episode ended, so I had nothing to brace for. Even the comedies had to be ones without an annoying laugh track. Then I started seeking out movies and TV shows about grief, and I bought as many books on the subject as I could find. I thought if I learned all I could, it might help me.
But I couldn’t think my way out of grief. So I tried neurofeedback, sitting with electrodes on my scalp and breathing in and out in sync with a ball rising and falling on a screen. It’s designed to help your brain regulate itself. I tried Brainspotting, a form of psychotherapy that uses eye movements to process and resolve traumatic experiences. I even tried Reiki, an energy healing technique that soothed my back pain but didn’t alleviate my grief. In time, I saw a grief therapist who told me I was doing well and didn’t understand why I was seeking help. I left that appointment frustrated, as I had with the others, but this time I was also curious. Her words stayed with me.
Maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me. Maybe this is what grief truly is, and I shouldn’t treat it like a research project. So I stopped trying to fix it and sat with the feelings that came up. I did my best not to push them away. That opened the door to another thought: What if I gave my grief the space it was asking for? Not to see it as an enemy, but as a guest I could invite to sit next to me and make comfortable. What if I saw it as a teacher asking me to listen and understand who I was becoming because of it? What if I was grateful to feel it at all, because the feeling was love, and the suffering was how much I loved her?
It’s been five years since my mother died, and my driveway circles have grown into walks along the beach. Grief still walks beside me.
You are not alone. If you are walking your own circles, or feel like no one understands your grief or why life after caregiving doesn’t feel like you “got your life back,” please know there are others who do. Daughterhood offers three Grief Connection Circles and two After Caregiving Circles throughout the month. And if you are grieving someone who is still here, you are welcome too.
