Grief plays its own song in my head. It is the beat of a heart—slowed down as reality catches up. It is the melody of a childhood lullaby we sing to let her go peacefully into the light. It is the lyrics of screams and shrieks and sobs and silence. It is silence. It is the crescendo of an anniversary and the fall of time that passes as I cling to it. Grief was nothing. Grief is everything. 

This is the first time I have seen snow on my mother’s grave. I have watched the seasons whirl around me as I try to escape the permanence of death. I first met her grave in a drizzling haze, hitting the ground mixed with salty tears and long-gone dreams of remission. I’ve since met it on Mother’s Day, right as the tulips begin to drop into summer. On her birthday, when the sun beats down on hot July days. On Christmas, with a chill in the air stalling the holiday cheer. The snow is bright. It reflects back at me the light from the sky such that I am blinded by it. It hurts to open my eyes; when I do I am confronted with another painful sight. The snow reflects back my mothers life and my own grief, longing, and hope. It reflects two years of loss and eighteen years of love.

I have encountered many methods of grief over the past two years, from Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ 5 stages to my own made up process and steps. Today, I come to my mother’s grave with new experience, new loss, and a new sense of self. Each week I bring myself to the Children’s Bereavement Center. There, I have met hundreds of others who have engaged with loss in their own ways. We come together to grieve and to share. If there is anything I have learned, it is that grief is not private or singular. Grief is a shared experience, something I’ve discovered more about myself in conversations and insights with others than in my own head. My grief is not my own; it is grief for my mother that is shared with everyone whose life she touched. 

Two years later and I am still unsure that there is a definition of grief that will truly encompass loss. I have researched and read, hypothesized and tested, and yet I still run short of words and phrases to ever articulate the culmination of grief. I still do not believe such a simple five letter word can encapsulate it all—the anger, the longing, the happy days and the sad ones. Here’s what I do believe; grief is creative. Grief is a lesson. Grief is long, and grief is short. Grief sinks into your soul, farther than you ever knew it could. I will never be the person I was before I lost my mother. I have left a part of me behind, the pieces I let go because they were dragging down. But no matter what I shed, I am tethered to a special piece of Earth forever. I feel myself drawn to grief—to feel it and let it encapsulate me. When I am in the cocoon of grief, I am still sixteen years old listening to my mother’s heartbeat. It sounds so strong you would never have known she was dying. 

There are no limits to where grief permeates—it cannot be contained by force or by will. I have tried to box it in, but there is nowhere it fits. It sits in lonely classrooms, in crowded hallways, and in the faces of people whom I have never known. Grief escapes; that is all it knows. A little part of grief runs away each time I listen to the songs we played to her when she died. Another part pulls off when another person recounts a story I have never known. All of my grief is running out in front of me, and I chase after it; maybe one day I will finally beat them to the finish line. But I have never been good at running. I grow tired of my feet hitting the pavement, and I tell myself I can stop at the next light. The next light turns to the next car, the next car to the next mile, and I cannot stop despite the tiredness—eventually I fall. 

The snow is a clean slate. I do not know how many times it has fallen and melted—and I haven’t seen it. So much grief happens in the darkness. It happens where we cannot see it, where we cannot feel it. But it lingers. It changes us. It hides itself in the corners of our minds and shifts the way the world around us looks. A slow shift into the gray scale. But eventually, there is color. It seeps in through the cracks, through other people. I am forever grateful for the people who have returned the color to my life. Without them, it would be impossible to see. 

I have struggled with the words to describe my mother and her death. No matter how many words I have produced about losing her, none seem to actually capture her. Words, for all their might, failed me as I tried to say goodbye. Words, for all the comfort they have brought me, were unable to cushion my fall. Words, for all their power, could not escape me when she died. I never gave a eulogy at my own mother’s funeral. I couldn’t muster the words. But as mothers always do, she has already handled that for me. 

It has taken us years, and will take us many more, to comb through her things. Earlier this year, my dad found a paper she had completed as part of a leadership training—Deborah Mueller’s Eulogy of Self. The worksheet asked the students to “Imagine that you are giving a eulogy about yourself at your own funeral.” It was completed in the Summer of 2019. My mom had this to say about herself; “She cared. She gave hope to others.” My mother has somehow found the answer to my endless questions, even after she has gone. My mother cared, and she has given me so much hope. For myself, for her, and for the world without her. It is a dark place, and yet she has found a way to provide me with the light. Peppy pop songs to get through the days and a lullaby for late nights. 

This is the 3rd installation in a series entitled Notes on Grief; the previous 2 editions can be found on the Keynote