There aren’t words for grief; I will try.
Sometimes it is looking in a mirror and realizing we were more similar than I thought. That makes me sad.
Sometimes it is knowing she would not have been able to stand my drinking or the fact that I’m probably an atheist. That makes me happy.
Sometimes it is looking back on all the ways I ran away from her and how I felt so overwhelmed with the absurdity of death, life, and fear. That makes me angry.
Sometimes I think that losing my mom was the best thing that ever happened to me. Sometimes I think it was the worst. Would I have been different if she had stayed? Would she have been different?
The cliché that time heals all wounds is absolutely true. There are moments where I see pictures of her as she was sick—flashing images of someone I didn’t recognize anymore. This overwhelms me. But five years later, most of the time, I am okay. I can talk about her without crying. I can study it in the same way some people study language or science. They find beauty in their work because it makes sense in their brain; I find beauty in mine because it does not.
I do not consider myself a religious person. At one time I was unsure. Atheism, for me, provides peace, not answers. I find what some call God in the absurdity of life and in the things that no one can understand. This universal force does not tell me what to do, and in the same way, I do not expect it to act. It does not explain the universe to me nor offer absolute truth, rather, it encourages me to listen. And I guess it listens to me. It is in these quiet moments that I am able to feel both the depths of my sorrow, the heights of joy, and the feeling in my throat that tells me I am fearful; with complete peace.
I think my mom felt a similar peace when she passed. I counted the seconds between her breaths and dissociated from my feelings, but I knew she met her God in that time. God looked different for her than he did for me when I was religious; I think he gives people an image of himself that they need. My mom needed truth and stability. She needed to know her children would go to heaven someday. What is heaven? That is another unanswered question. Heaven to me is a quiet field somewhere that has no name, the feeling of spring, and the smell of rain. It is the absence of that feeling in my throat that indicates fear.
Grief is a constant searching for heaven, a heaven in which they are here again. It is losing the meaning of life and climbing uphill to find it again.
My favorite memory of my mom is the last memory I have of her before she got sick. It is my fifteenth birthday. She is sitting across the table from me at a shitty French restaurant I would someday work at. We are smiling about something I can’t remember. It is the first time I remember seeing her as a human being—breathing and beating and speaking a language I finally understood. This is the way I see her now. There are no fights, no rules—just me and her, breathing together.