Grieving the Loss of Her Physical Form, But Still Feeling Her Loving Presence

Each day, I’m more and more convinced time is an illusion. 

I say that only half-joking.  The days are flying by, yet it seems impossible I graduated high school ten years ago.

And somehow, we’re already five months into 2022; that’s mind-boggling.

It’s been over a month since I last posted here. With time speeding forward, circumstances pulled me away from this portion of March First Media. 

As is always the case, life has been filled with highs and lows. Within the same week, I signed a contract for a freelance writing gig and commemorated the one-year mark of my beloved grandmother leaving this Earth. A contrast not unfamiliar to me, as I started my current full-time position five days after she passed.

Grief is simultaneously a complicated and simple emotion. 

Leading up to the anniversary, I felt off—blocked. While I continued to journal nearly every day, I blanked each moment I sat down to craft a blog post.

“Well, that’s it. I’m no longer a writer,” I thought multiple times throughout the hiatus, fearing the days of sharing my story with you were a fluke, worried that the flow I craved would never return.

While logically, I knew my Mimi’s passing date was approaching, it wasn’t something I actively pondered. 

I still feel her every day; I thought I was “over it.”

But on Monday, May 2, three days before the one-year mark, I broke.

I sobbed and wailed; my chest heaved. I could feel my heart releasing stored pain as tears and snot ran down my face (if you Google the term “ugly crying,” you’ll find an accurate depiction of me). 

As my partner lay next to me, alternating between telling me to let it out and making me laugh (which he said made me sound maniacal; he wasn’t wrong), he picked up his phone and started typing. Moments later, Nora McInerny’s Ted Talk, “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it,” began to play.

In the span of two months, Nora miscarried, lost her father, and her husband died.

She has since dedicated her life to discussing death and grief, aiming to make the awful and uncomfortable a little more bearable. Somehow, she does this effortlessly in a beautiful and hilarious way.

Her words were so poignant, so real. The idea that someone could turn such extreme tragedy into a tool to help people work through theirs, touched my heart.

I was grateful my partner found it. 

Every minute of the video was engaging. The love she carried for her husband, Aaron, was palpable. Although she remarried and shares a blended family with her current husband, she explains that Aaron never left her. That her memories and the love they shared transcend time. That Aaron still is. 

Nora closed with the following words, encapsulating the complexity of grief—an emotion we all hope to avoid but one that we’re all destined to experience.

“You don’t get it until you get it—until you do it. And once you do it, once it’s your love or your baby, once it’s your grief and your front row at the funeral, you get it. You understand what you’re experiencing is not a moment in time; it’s not a bone that will reset. But that you’ve been touched by something chronic, something incurable. It’s not fatal, but sometimes grief feels like it could be. And if we can’t prevent it in one another, what can we do? What we can do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed and not all wounds are meant to heal. We need each other to remember, to help each other remember that grief is a multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad and happy; you’ll be grieving and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again. If they’re lucky, they’ll love again. But yes, absolutely they’re going to move forward, but that doesn’t mean they’ve moved on.”

Her words mended something within me. They gave me an understanding of a feeling I struggled to put into words.

Mimi is with me every day. I see her eyes in the blue jay that finds me every week, smell her perfume carried by the spring breeze, and feel her embrace in the sun's rays. 

She isn't gone; the way we communicate has just changed.

Still, there are days like May 2, when the realization sets in I won’t see her again in this lifetime, and grief bubbles to the surface again.

But, it passes, replaced by the next moment’s emotion. 

There’s so much more I have to say about Mimi and the incredible bond we shared—the nuggets of wisdom, love, and understanding she gave over 27 years. 

But for now, those memories live inside my head and heart.

Thank you for giving me the space to share my life; it’s a privilege to write for you. 

My goal is to make you feel less alone in this experiment of life and remind you that you, too, have stories and gifts worthy of being shared. 

So, feel your feelings. Don't shove them down and hope they’ll go away someday—sit with them, experience them. And when you’re ready, you’ll feel a release—one that allows you to move through to the next moment’s emotion.