This was and is my travel blog. But I didn't write anything about my trip to Germany in April 2018 or anything about my trip to Africa in July 2019. As I lay awake last night, struggling once again to fall asleep, I decided that I wanted to talk here about this year's journey, the journey through grief.
2020 brought change and loss to everyone in some degree, even to those fortunate few who had very good years. Everyone lost time with friends and family, even if their business finally took off, or if they got to enjoy working from home full time, or if they got the chance to take early retirement and spent their summer at the cottage. Everyone lost vacation trips, dinner parties, restaurant meals, and stress-free trips to the grocery store. Everyone lost easy assumptions about how the world works, and everyone lost the feeling of normality. Some had larger struggles: they had to learn new ways of working as the world changed and then changed again. They had to become their kids' teachers for the first time or they had to teach in-person in the middle of a pandemic. They had to struggle to keep their jobs or had to struggle to keep their institutions alive. They lost income or even their livelihoods. Some lost their health or their lives. Everyone is grieving something this past year.
I shared in this pandemic grief, although I was fortunate not to lose income, livelihood, health, or life. I merely mourned my ability to pass through the world with ease. I merely mourned certainty, normality, companionship, planning: the ordinary disappointments of pandemic life.
But for me 2020 was also a year of personal loss. 2020 was the year that we sold my childhood home. It is the year that I got trapped in Saskatchewan for 5 months by a combination of COVID and my mother's failing health, isolated from my current home and from my partner. It is the year that I cared for my mother, instead of her caring for me. It is the year that my mother died.
One by one, day by day, month by month, loss by loss.
Losing a parent is .... natural and inevitable? It is perfectly ordinary for our parents to age and then die. It's an everyday tragedy. One that we are expected to move beyond without comment, or at least, no more comment than a heartfelt statement of sympathy by our friends or acquaintances when they learn of our loss. After that, we are expected to get on with our lives, despite the chasm, despite the fact that everything has changed.
I spent 2020 grieving alone.
Some of it was the sheer isolation of grief. No one but me felt the overwhelming exhaustion that hit every time I had to do something, anything to do with my Mom's estate. No one but me had flashbacks to those endless last hours sitting at Mom's bedside in the hospital, Mom's breath slowing, stopping, then strengthening, over and over for almost 36 hours. No one but me felt the frozen emptiness that would not dissolve into tears, no matter how far I walked.
The pandemic made it worse. We couldn't gather to memorialize my Mom's life as one would normally do, to share memories, and hugs, and tears. We had to make do with 30 socially-distanced minutes at her graveside, with only close family in attendance. We had to divide Mom's belongings via shared spreadsheet. Clearing the house was complicated by the need to limit in-person interactions and my sister's need to isolate after a COVID exposure. After I finally returned to Vancouver I couldn't go back to Saskatchewan again. I couldn't visit family or visit her grave no matter how much I wanted to return. I couldn't join family for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. As I tried to re-integrate into my life in Vancouver I couldn't seek consolation with friends, or distraction in trips, or occupation by volunteering.
When Christmas finally arrived, I still hadn't unpacked my two small boxes of mementos from Mom's house. I couldn't stand to see her Christmas ornaments on my Christmas tree. I started to cry when I was alone, wracking sobs at the thought of my first holidays without her. The rest of my life without my Mom, the loss of my link to my past, my link to my family, my link to my stories about myself, the link to the history that brought me to this life and this place. But mostly, just the loss of my Mom.
I was startled when a friend offered me the hope that I'd spent my holidays thinking about my Mom and sharing stories with family. I haven't done this. I couldn't. It felt very strange to think of already being remote from the pain of her loss, that I could already be warmly nostalgic.
Then my mom's sister, the aunt who had spoken to my mother every single day for her last 2 years, the aunt who still talks to my Mom every morning with her coffee: she said almost the same thing.
It had been 6 months and 3 weeks since my mother died. Was I supposed to be 'over it' already? I had just begun to move past the initial shock and pain. I had only just begun to cry.
It shook me.
Was there something abnormal or excessive about my grief? It still felt like the centre of my life. Shouldn't it still be the centre of my emotional life?
I started thinking about grief and the journey through grief. I started to think about writing this series of blog entries to work through my feelings.
