When Unspoken Grief Speaks

I turned 40 years old last week.  Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of my mother’s death in a car accident.  For practically my whole life, the turning of the next year in my life and my mom’s death have been inextricably linked.  I can’t think of one without the other.  In my lowest moments I’ve perceived the proximity of these dates as a punishing symbol of my lot in life: my mom was gone; she would miss every important milestone; she left an unfillable hole; celebration and joy were precursors to bad things happening.  Through the years, however, this perception has not persisted, and I have started to find a different meaning in the fateful juxtaposition of these milestone dates in my life.

When I was a child, I did not grieve openly for my mom.  I watched my immediate family – especially my father and my paternal grandmother, who raised me – and I followed their lead.  Starting on the morning after my mom was killed, when my father told me that my mother was in heaven and my grandmother told me that I could call her mommy now, I quickly understood that our family would not confront what really happened.  We would not say why my mother was gone.  We would try to normalize our lives.  I did not start calling my grandmother mommy – my instinct was to reject this approach to my own grief immediately – but I was mostly complicit in my family’s silence for many years.  I never stopped thinking about my mother and wondering who she was, but like my father and grandmother I kept my longing for my mother below the surface.  I sensed that my pain would cause more pain, so I remained alone in my grief.

What did being alone in my grief look like?  When I was in the third grade, I made a Mother’s Day card that said, “I miss you, Mommy,” and when my grandmother’s head dropped into her hands after reading it, I picked it up and threw it away.  When I was in the eighth grade, I got angry at a friend who was complaining about shopping with her mother.  I said, bitterly, “At least you have a mother.”  While everyone slept that night, I drew a picture of my mother’s face with a pencil in the dim bedroom light.  When I got to her green eyes, I made her pupils darker and darker until the pencil point made a hole in the paper.  When I was sixteen, my mind overflowing with a teenager’s questions about growing up, I stood right in front of a black-and-white picture of my mom’s face, our noses touching, and spoke out loud to her, with the bedroom door closed, “Who are you?  Where are you?”  I was so angry.

These were the private expressions of my grief, but on the surface, to the rest of the world, everything seemed just fine.  I was a stellar student, burying my head in my books for hours after school and on the weekends.  I performed in plays at local community theaters and my high school.  I belonged to clubs.  I had friends.  I dated boys.  I aspired to college. 

I knew that I couldn’t keep my grief inside me for the rest of my life.  I started using theater to explore dark subjects – I once sang a solo called “What is it like to be dead?” – and I began writing about my mom’s death and my family’s silence once I entered college and was far away from home.  But I waited too long to let things out.  The suppressed grief inside me, the feelings that I’d kept below the surface trying to conform to my family’s silence for so many years, began to manifest in ways that were out of my control.  Starting late in high school, I got a bad headache, and I would worry about having a brain tumor.  I would notice an irregularly shaped mole, and my stomach would drop as I contemplated the likelihood of melanoma.  My heart started fluttering in college, and my ability to exercise was compromised.  In my twenties, I had a brain scan because I was experiencing unexplained dizziness.  And on and on.

For most of my adult life, I’ve struggled with health anxiety.  An irrational fear creeps up on me once in awhile – usually in response to a benign physical symptom that the average person would calmly assess.  I’ve described my anxiety as a heart-wrenching roller coaster ride: I know when I’m securely buckled into the car; I won’t be able to get off until the ride is officially over.  Through the repetitive twists and turns of the ride, I try to convince myself that my life isn’t on the verge of ending, that there are non-life-threatening explanations for the symptoms I am experiencing, that I am stabilizing, until the car abruptly shifts and plunges down a steep incline and my stomach drops to the floor again.  At its worst, the anxiety occupies my mind when I wake up and as I fall asleep.  It clouds my view as I gaze at my beautiful children: will I be here in a year, or two, or three?  I split into two different people: the highly functioning mother of three and higher education professional AND the fearful, cowering, vulnerable body.

As I think about it now, it’s no surprise that I have struggled with anxiety for most of my adult life.  Though I am lucky that it has never truly debilitated me, it has caused me great suffering.  At its core is the fear that everything good in my life will cease to exist, that I will be ripped out of my own life and the life of my children, that I will die with things unfinished.  Doesn’t it make sense that a young girl who lost her mother just days after her fifth birthday and who didn’t have the emotional space to truly confront her grief might end up living with deep-seeded and uncontrollable fear?  Grief takes up space in the body and the mind.  It has to manifest somehow. For me my unspoken grief began speaking very loudly inside my head: be afraid; nothing good ever lasts; watch out; just when you think you can be happy, surprise!

My fortieth birthday was a happy one.  Today as I commuted with my daughters to school, we talked about the significance of today’s anniversary.  “Your mom was 22 when she died.  This is the 35^th anniversary of her death,” my middle daughter said.  “She would have been 57 now.”  I have been fighting my anxiety for years, but only recently have I been talking out loud in a big way about my mother’s death and the effects of the silence on my family.  I am emphasizing the importance of shared grief, because I’ve seen the most extreme example of what silent, repressed grief can do to someone: my father died of alcoholism in 2013.  I will continue to reckon with my own grief and tell this story, and as I do I hope to gain more and more control over my emotional life. 

Now I see the proximity of my birthday and the anniversary of my mom’s death as what it is: a meaningful coincidence.  It’s meaningful because I have chosen to give it meaning.  On every birthday, despite the death anniversary that will always follow, I choose to renew my commitment to life and love and telling the truth and human connection.