Feminist Advice Friday: How can I deal with immense grief?

A reader writes…

I know from your posts that you know grief. I’m writing because I don’t know what else to do after my mother just died. I’m so sad. Just so sad. How do you cope? How do I cope? What do I do? Please help.

My answer:

I’m so sorry for your loss.

When someone dies, it can feel like there’s a hole somewhere in the body that you can neither find nor fill. That hole is the body’s way of acknowledging the magnitude of loss. It feels awful, I know. But I encourage you to sit with it. Run to it, not away from it.

Grief is important. Because love is important.

I’ve held hands with my family at funerals for people who died too young too many times to count. There’s been a lot of trauma in my family, a lot of inherited suffering. I thought these experiences made me thoughtful about grief, offered me some understanding of how the process worked. But nothing could have prepared me for the year of sorrow when I said goodbye to my daughter and my mother in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. There were times I thought my grief would swallow me alive. I don’t feel the same.

I’m also remarkably the same. It’s amazing how normal you can be in the midst of grief. How easily one vacillates between existential despair and happily playing with the cats and the toddler.

So yes, I do know grief. And what grief has taught me is that it is an unpredictable intruder that none of us can really know, regardless of how many times it breaks into our happy unsuspecting lives, points menacingly at us, and proclaims, “Your turn.”

Every grief, like every relationship, is different. The notion that there is a right way to grieve, a linear trajectory that moves us from the devastation of loss to a more hopeful future where that loss no longer destroys us, is harmful.

Friend, I can hear your pain. There is no salve that will cure it. Because grief, however awful it feels, must be felt.

That’s because grief is love.

I think if you think of it that way, your grief will begin to feel less like a burden you carry, and more like an offering to honor the person you loved and lost. We must allow grief to change us. We must allow it to be itself.

Grief is love’s last offering.

If we are live long enough, it awaits us at the end of every relationship. Everyone we know will one day die. We can look at this as a tragedy, or we can acknowledge it as a reminder of how precious life truly is. We can view grief as a burden, or as a sort of last act that honors a relationship.

There is no working through grief. It is not a process or a journey to the other side. We integrate the loss into our lives, into ourselves. It becomes part of the patchwork of experiences that make us who we are.

Don’t fight that by trying to rush or fight through grief.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman says that our final death is when the last person speaks our name. We live on in memories, in the effects we have on the people we love and on the larger world. By grieving your mother, by speaking her name, you keep her alive.

It’s lonely and painful, but it’s pain with a purpose. It transforms you from the person you were before the loss to the slightly wiser person you have the opportunity to be now. If you let it, grief can make you more compassionate, more empathetic. It can awaken you to the suffering that unites us all, connecting you to the sad-looking stranger on the street and the cashier who just doesn’t have time for your shit today.

Grief makes us more human. And in so doing, it makes us more alive.

You loved your mother. Your grief tells you that.

I’m so sorry for your loss.

I publish #feministadvicefriday every Friday(ish) here and on Facebook. You can get early access to Feminist Advice Friday, as well as other content I don’t publish anywhere else, by subscribing for free to my Substack newsletter. You can submit your own question to zawn.villines@gmail.com, by messaging my Facebook page, or anonymously by using this site’s contact form.