Weaving grief into my emotional tapestry
Grief visits every year during what I call “grief week,” stretching from the first to second Mondays in August. I’ve absorbed this week into my calendar of events just as I’ve absorbed grief into my emotional tapestry.
On the first Monday in August five years ago, we found our mother unresponsive and barely breathing on her bedroom floor. On the following Monday, my sister, brother, and I made the decision to remove her from life support.
Although half a decade has passed, I still grieve for my mom. I wake up from a dream, her image shimmering at the edges of my mind, and think I need to call her, how it’s been too long since we talked.
I feel her absence acutely during grief week, along with her birthday and Mother’s Day and life’s big events like my nephew’s college graduation in May. I struggled to get through it without sobbing, envisioning my mother sitting next to me, dabbing proud tears from her eyes.
Three years ago, we lost my father-in-law, and this year, grief week doubled down. On the first Monday in August, my sister’s mother-in-law, a woman I also loved, lost her battle with cancer. My tapestry grows.
Various models of grief exist, including grief as an emotional trajectory following five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Known as the Kubler-Ross model, the stages are not meant to be linear but instead to help us name our feelings.
While these stages helped me after my mother died, it seemed as if something was missing. The acceptance stage means accepting the loss along with creating space for a new normal. Life will never be as it was, divided by a before and after. At this stage, “we have given grief its time,” opening us to our new lives.
But what if grief never leaves?
It felt like my grief over my mother had become a permanent part of me. I told myself I needed to move on. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with grief and loss — move on? When I found the Tonkin model of growing around grief, I realized my feelings were normal.
In essence, I had drawn a circle to symbolize myself and shaded it entirely with grief. At first, my grief consumed me, but as I began to embrace life again and sadness didn’t devour me, my circle expanded. Although my grief remained the same size, it no longer occupied as much space. It had lost its relative strength.
I will never move past grief completely, no matter how much I accept loss. At times, like the anniversary of my mother’s death and my nephew’s graduation, I feel the full force of the shaded part of my circle. Sitting with my grief when at its most intense honors my emotions. It gives my grief space to breathe.
By suffocating my grief, pushing it down no matter when it shows itself, gives it strength, keeps it at the same aspect ratio as when I first shaded in the circle.
Grief will come, sometimes when it’s least expected. It’s woven into the story my tapestry tells. But now I understand. Grief is only part of my story.
Originally published in Indelible Ink on Medium on August 15, 2019.
Krista S. Schumacher 