Grief is a Ghost Story

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Just prior to Halloween, a friend from grad school visited me. It’s always nice to have someone come over to the house, especially for lunch or for dinner. I love socializing around food, but I rarely have guests visiting anymore. Less so since the pandemic. I hadn’t seen my friend since 2019, as she’d moved after graduation and has just recently returned to Vegas.

She commented positively on my house, which my husband and I bought in 2021. It’s a nice house. I won’t deny that. She’d only been to our previous townhome. As she was helping me take the food out to our patio so that we could dine al fresco, she buoyantly asked, “has your mom come to visit you here yet? Does she love it?”

I had forgotten that she didn’t know. I am not one to hesitate when it comes to breaking the news. But I also recognize the burden it can place on the other person when I tell them. Still, I am more of a rip the bandages off fast kinda gal. I do not hold back when letting people know that both my parents died during the pandemic, one after the other. I don’t see the point of pretending.

So, over lunch, I told her my ghost story.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Basically the first half of the pandemic was marked by helplessly watching my lovely, beautiful mother die slowly and painfully from a cancer that had metastasized to her pelvic bone. One that, if she had wanted to live longer, would have required such a radical surgery that she would have been left not only without one of her entire legs, but also half of her pelvis, including her bladder and portions of her intestines. If she had opted for this surgery, and survived it, she would have lived the rest of her life in an assisted living facility. She could no longer treat the area with radiation, as she’d radiated the area twice and you can’t continuously do that without the bone crumbling. So she had to choose between two horrible choices: dissection or death.

As I was catching my friend up, I realized that I still have a difficult time talking about what happened two years ago. Mainly because of the element of magical thinking. When I relive this time, I imagine that perhaps if we’d just done things slightly different, she could have survived a bit longer or she might have never died. Or there’s the thought that what if she’d caught it earlier, or the even more magical thought of what if it had never come back. This is my brain doing its normal exercises in futility. It’s well trained in that.

August 2021 was when my mom went on hospice. She still had so much life energy then, but she was in extreme pain from the cancer and couldn’t continue the palliative chemotherapy. There is only so much a body can take.

I relayed to my friend that I moved back to Tampa in the late summer/early fall of 2021 to take care of my mom as she was dying. The fall will always be a season that I associate with death now. I know that most of the world north of the Equator associate death with fall since it is the season in which nature hibernates in an extremely dramatic and beautiful fashion. Halloween and Dia de los Muertos are holidays associated with this time. Even Obon, the Japanese holiday that allows the dead to visit relatives over several days, is celebrated in mid/late August (which isn’t quite fall but it isn’t far from it).

This season will always be a portal for me. I still feel as if it had just happened and I can remember moments during those months two years ago that are so clear, I almost feel that I could reach out and ask my mom a question or hug her, touch her hand again, and tell her how much I love her. Despite knowing that she’s now nearly two years gone.

Halloween was really the last day before my mom lost her ability to stand up on her own. On November 1st, she became bed bound. I did try to get her back on her feet another day or two. It was probably my pride that made me ask her to just keep trying. I couldn’t understand why she no longer felt that she could stand up. She did stand up a few more times due to me trying to get to do so. I remember she remarked to me, “how did you know I could still get up with your help?” But after a day of that she didn’t have the strength any longer to hold herself up, even with our help.

Once a person becomes bed bound when on hospice, it is usually only a matter of weeks before they pass. For my mom, she had six weeks left of her life.

The second half of the pandemic, from just prior to my mother’s death in 2021 until my father’s death at the end of 2022, was spent dealing with the loss of my mother, selling her house, getting rid of her possessions, and dealing with everything that comes after someone dies. That year was also spent dealing with the loss of my father via estrangement.

I haven’t publicly shared what happened regarding my dad because it was such a difficult time and I still can’t understand why it happened. There’s an irrationality to it that can’t be reasoned out, no matter from how many angles you look at it. Even while I was telling my friend, I was reliving the trauma and having a hard time not feeling an echo of the extreme stress and pain that several relatives put me through just as I was losing my mother. I don’t know if I can ever write directly about it because I’d rather not dig into it. It is just a huge ball of compounded sadness and anger that has not been helpful to reopen. I can’t unpack this without having to re-open wounds. It’s why I have not written too often about my dad here.

People always say that great writing is vulnerable. But I don’t think that is true. Great writing can articulate and communicate feelings, but it isn’t vulnerable and the person writing it isn’t writing from a place of vulnerability either. When I am in a state of vulnerability, I am often incoherent. I can’t think well and I certainly can’t use language skillfully. I believe I can’t and won’t write about what happened because I can still barely talk about it without feeling sick. When I’m able to speak about it, then I will be able to write about it.

My friend was of course shocked after I told her this ghost story. I mean I would be as well if someone told me the same news, especially if I didn’t know. We spent the rest of the afternoon catching up with her life, but then she returned to the subject of my mother. I had forgotten that she’d met both my mom and my sister at a small Ethiopian restaurant in Tampa during AWP in 2018.

“Your mom was a powerful woman,” she said. My mom was, but I didn’t think she could perceive that much of my mom’s character in the few hours she knew her. It felt a bit euphemistic. A dressing up of some sort of bluntness or brashness that my mother openly showed while we were at the restaurant. I think my mom was embarrassed that the restaurant was serving us slowly due to a traditional Ethiopian wedding feast that was happening in the restaurant the same time we were there with a group of 10 (plus countless other tables filled with people). She was friends with the owners so she was probably being casual in her interactions with them. Something that could be misinterpreted as pushy or forward. Under this forwardness was her desire for me to have made a good impression on my colleagues with a fantastic evening together. We did end up waiting nearly an hour to be served our food that evening, if I recall correctly.

That restaurant - which had been open for at least 15 years - no longer exists now. The pandemic probably forced it out of business. My mom and I sometimes went there to eat when I would visit her. I looked for it when I was in Tampa a year ago but it had closed. Something about that finality made me realize that one part of my life was over.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

That is the marker of a death. You and the person you loved can’t make new memories together. You can’t discover new restaurants, or go to old ones you love. You can’t watch new movies with them and have long discussions. You can’t update them on the latest insanity in the world and wonder together why everyone seems to be under some hypnagogic spell. There are no new adventures that will ever happen with that person, only the ones that you have from your memories.

I suppose you could continue to talk to your loved one in your mind as if you had an imaginary friend, but in reality that time in which you had to share your life with them is gone. You aren’t getting it back.

That finality also plays tricks with your mind. You think, did I do enough to show that I loved the person who is dead? Did I spend too much time not being present when I was around them? Did I waste the time we had together when they were healthy and we were able to spend time? Did I take their love for granted?

For me, I often feel a sense of guilt for having lived so many years overseas - far away from my parents - and for not having children, though I never felt pressure from them to do so. I also felt that I’d spent so much time focusing on myself and struggling with my own hang ups, ones that my parents could see but could do nothing to change.

As I was telling my friend about the betrayal that led to my estrangement from my father just prior to my mother’s death, when I needed his support the most, I somewhat understood what the loss of my parents has done to me.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I see that loss almost akin to the theory of our universe. Space continues to expand from a massive force over millions of years ago. That event is still very much actively shaping everything, including our future. Yet, things that occurred in the past can suddenly erupt and become critical to our existence. Time isn’t as linear as we think it is.

I have come to understand that almost all of our daily lives must be spent thinking of anything but death, ours and those we love, in order for us to be functional members of our society and of our families. But death ultimately is the engine that drives us forward unconsciously. Because we have a finite amount of time to experience and explore what it means to be in human form on this planet, in all its beauty, suffering and pain.

Once it’s over, our physical existence ceases but the impact of our life does not. Like the universe, it expands outward over many years. It becomes an infinite constellation. We continue to have an affect on those who loved us, in memories, in thoughts, and even in actions. Sometimes we even shape the lives of people who will never meet us.

The grief I hold inside me will never go away. Anyone who has lost someone they loved knows this. There is nothing that can prepare you for it either. You can read every single book written about it and it still can’t prepare you because it isn’t just the immediate loss that matters. It is the expansion of that loss that continues over time. Everyone experiences this differently.

Yes, you move forward in your life. Restaurants that once existed close. New movies come out. New insanity breaks out in the world. And you build a new life without those you loved. You hold onto the beauty, the memories, the things you must be grateful for, you take all of it for granted less than you did before your loss. Life will never again be what it was, but you try to live your life as fully as possible, you savor those moments with friends and loved ones, knowing that one day it will be your turn to go.

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