Reflections on Grief

 

So today marks the 4^th anniversary of my Mother’s death.  She died in 2021 of COVID.  She was only 81 years old.  Because of COVID, I hadn’t seen her since December of 2019.  She was hospitalized in March of 2021 (and died in April).  It was a harrowing 5 weeks.  She lived in Delaware, as does the rest of my family.  I live in southwest Ohio.  Not that any of that mattered – hospitals still were not allowing visitors. I called the nurses' station twice a day, every day, for updates on how she was doing, and then texted these updates to family.  She was doing poorly, then she was improving, then her oxygen levels started to drop again, then she was failing…Then I got the call from the doctor on the morning of April 11 – she wasn’t going to make it.  My wife and I packed the car and drove as fast as possible to Delaware – a 550-mile trip.  At that moment, the hospital was allowing one family member to visit at a time. Somehow, they let more than one of us in at a time, but they were not happy about it. 

I got to spend her last 30 hours on earth with her.  When she was awake, she was lucid and aware.  She knew she was going to leave us.  She didn’t want to go.  She told us she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of not being with her four children (all of us in our 50s and 60s by that point).  You see, she lived for her children.  We were her life.  We were her identity. She was so concerned that we were all going to be okay.  That is what she wanted to discuss – were we going to be okay? 

My sister and I stayed with her the entire time.  She drew her last breath at 2:45 am on April 14, 2021.  And my life changed forever.  I had already lost my Dad when I was 25 years old, but loss is a strong word.  He was never really there, and at the time, his death meant little to me, save for thinking what a lonely, sad life he lived. His life and death mean more to me now, now that I do not have any living parents.  When my mother died, so much of me went with her.  Social psychologists call this collective memory (Wegner, 1987)– the shared memories and recollections you hold with people close to you, like your family.  When one or more of those people leave or die, it feels like losing part of your mind. When she died, she took with her all of the experiences I had as a baby, a kid, or even an adult that I could not remember. I cannot recall the number of times I would call her and ask things like, “when did I have the chicken pox?”; “what was the name of the neighbor down the street that I ran track with?”; “how old was I when I started my period?”.  And so on.  Now she was gone, and that part of our collective experiences and memories, from her perspective, was also gone. I felt so alone in the world.  I felt like an orphan.

It’s been four years since she took her last breath.  In that time, life, for me and my siblings, has gone on.  We have all had many life experiences in those four years, and she has missed all of them. Sometimes, it feels like those life experiences do not matter because they do not contribute to her collective memory.

In some odd way, I am glad her loss still hurts so much – it reminds me how much I loved her, and how much she loved me. And the one person who could help me manage my grief is not here anymore. 

References:

Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer-Verlag.