A Postcard From the Bunkers of Grief

Photo by Mindspace Studio on Unsplash

These Months Following the Death of My Mom Are Not What I Expected

In some ways, the continued pandemic has provided a kind of bunker in which I can grieve. It’s been five months since she died and I still don’t leave home much. I spend a lot of time on the various couches in my house with my airpods stuck in my ears. When my kids try to talk to me I point to my earbuds and say, “I can’t hear you” and go back to my addictive Netflix show.

I’m a 41 year old married woman working two jobs and raising two kids. When else in my life would I have been afforded this kind of cocoon in which to grieve? I’m a person that spends two or three days a week commuting via the Beltway surrounding Washington, DC and on Interstate 95. Pre-pandemic I spent upwards of 10 hours in my car commuting every week and I only work that particular job part-time! What kind of person would choose that kind of commute? One that likes to feel the intensity of demands and pressure because it makes her feel important. When there is always somewhere to be, you start to think of yourself as necessary. It fuels you, this being needed. I need to leave work by 4pm, to get home by 5:45pm so I can run my kid over to her practice, go back home and make dinner for the family while making sure homework is done and showers are had and teeth are brushed before bed.

For about five years before my mom died there was an enormous extra pressure in my life. One that on occasion blew me open, not unlike the full force steam coming out of the pressure cooker when your chicken is done. When the pressure of two jobs and two kids and one mom with a worsening neurodegenerative condition became too much to bear, the pressure would unleash. Usually in my bedroom, with my husband present.

During the Zoom memorial we had for my mom, my husband noted that only he and and my sister’s husband truly know what we have been through during the last few years of her life. Other people thought they knew, or got a little window into it from time to time, but only our husbands knew. They had their faces close to the pressure cooker when it released the steam. I do marvel at the fact that this man still wakes up next to me every morning and even smiles when he sees me. Better yet, he doesn’t say anything when I’m sitting on the couch now holding the tiny screen of my phone, squinting, and completely disengaged.

What My Grief Looks Like During the Pandemic

Here in the bunker the pressure is mostly gone. The commute has not yet come back, the kids only have to show up to school twice a week, and mom isn’t around to turn up the dial. What happens to the chicken when it’s placed in the pressure cooker, but it doesn’t get turned on? It lies there limp. That’s me, pale and jiggly on the couch with my iPhone.

We don’t talk about grief much. Even in a time when over half a million people have died from the virus, we are numb to the magnitude. We just want to get back to our lives. We want to sit in restaurants with partners and drink at bars with friends. We don’t like to think about the toll grief takes on people, that it might be hard to move through days and that in some ways, people never recover from grief. Our bosses expect us to jump back into work the same as always. People stop checking in and expect you’ve moved on. Folks who have lost someone know these things and live with this knowing embedded into their being. It’s a club no one wants to join, but when we do (and most likely you will), we see each other. We have a deep knowing of what it is to carry loss.

Allowing Grief To Be What It Is

Grief is so personal. I didn’t expect it to feel like the dimmer had been turned way down on my light. I expected lots of feelings, but that hasn’t been the case. Sort of numb, but also just dim. Dampened. Faded. Muted. In pre-pandemic life, many of the pressures would still have existed - the commute, the kids’ schedules, the filled-up calendar of events. I would have been able to be swallowed by busy, as so often we allow ourselves to be.

Instead I have lots of time to think and consider. I don’t have any knowings or new insight into grief, other than wanting to tell myself and other people that it is ok for grief to show up in whatever way it needs to. If that looks like a new and highly utilized folder on my phone with Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Apple TV, so be it. If it feels like extra flesh on the underside of my arms that rub against my body in a way that’s different than ever before - can I find grace for myself for that? If it stings like a prick of jealousy every time my friends talk about their parents getting vaccinated, am I willing to welcome that emotion in and sit with it before gently setting it free?

Some days yes, some days no. Some days the only solution is the couch and a new show.