The Truth about Overcoming the Death of a Loved One

Mourning is the outward expression of our grief.

The truth is, you never get over it. You cope. Adjust. But you can also evolve.

We have to go on, finding some meaning in death. If we couldn’t, the human race would have become extinct eons ago.

Death is all around us now. We feel for those who have lost people they love, and we mourn for the loss of people we knew.

I just learned that a friend’s brother-in-law died of coronavirus. He was only 55 years old. They are devastated, and I feel that loss for his senseless death.

Though the circumstances are not the same, it made me think of my mother, the quickness of her passing, and my road to recovery.

She died three months after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctors never identified the site, but it took her within months.

The beginning of the end started in April.

Diagnosis and Sentence

Mom had been clinically depressed her entire life and spent it in bed. At that time, Prozac and those other wonderful anti-depressants didn’t exist. Nothing did.

So when she was again “sick,” we rolled our eyes.

Another trip to the doctor. Who would drive her? Pick her up? Take her to the pharmacy for more drugs?

But this was more serious.

“I can’t go to the bathroom,” she told me.

Well, she was 74, and sometimes that happens.

“Prunes?’ I asked.

“No,” she replied, “that won’t help.”

It hit me. I realized that she meant she couldn’t pee.

“Well then, you need to go to the hospital. I’ll take you.”

“I’m going to back to bed,” she replied as she shuffled out of the bathroom. “Big day tomorrow.”

I let it go because I couldn’t get her out of bed. I gave up.

The big day she referred to was meeting my 50-year-old brother’s future in-laws for the first time. Guests were a big deal, and she was ready to greet them. As they walked through the front door, mom stepped out of the kitchen into the hall and fell. And no, she couldn’t get up.

A brother-in-law, who is also an MD, told us to call an ambulance. At the hospital, a stent was inserted to unblock her kidneys. Had she not fallen, she most likely would have died of renal failure that night.

For this reason, I often think of the fall as a miracle. Because of it, my mother was able to wear her lovely dress, and with the aid of drugs, in diapers, and a wheelchair, she attended my brother’s wedding and reception.

The hospital thought we were nuts, but my sister found a van that would accommodate a wheelchair. She, my other sister, and a cousin were nurses, so there was no stopping them.

After the wedding, we brought her back to the hospital. Two weeks later, she came home to hospice care.

My four siblings and I each took turns being the primary, sleeping in the living room, giving mom her morphine, turning her, changing her. The family team and friends and neighbors joined in to help us take care of “auntie” as she was called. It took a village.

Mom had been sick this time around.

By the end of June, she was gone.

Life without Mom

She died three days before her favorite holiday: the 4th of July. I spent most of the day in my room, a pillow over my ears to drown out the sound of the fireworks — the agony of listening to the happy voices oohing and ahhing.

I hadn’t stopped crying since her funeral. The grief overwhelmed me to the point that I didn’t understand. Our relationship was contentious, and we didn’t have that mother-daughter bond.

Maybe I was mourning not just her death, but for a relationship that never had been and now never would be.

As the fireworks exploded, the knife in my gut twisted more and more. Happiness and celebration were an abomination at a time like this. The thought of going on, wretched. I wanted to lay here forever.

That was the feeling for the remainder of the summer, the air too heavy to breathe, darkness rising into the brightest days.

I’d had waited three months for my mother to die. In the months preceding her death, I had a “hurry-up and get it over with” feeling. But death and loss do not end.

Thankfully, by September, time had done its trick, and I felt more grounded in a new season and a new beginning. The very act of physically moving into a new routine helped me adjust. I was beginning to feel lighter as the humid air-dried and cooled to the crispness of Fall.

Sadly my son, who was eight at the time, was finding it more difficult. He hadn’t begun to recover. He cried when I dropped him off at school and was quiet around the house. He looked up at me at one point and said:

“It’s just not the same here without nana.”

He was not just grieving. He was still in mourning.

The Difference Between Grieving and Mourning

“Grieving is the inward feeling. Mourning is the outward expression of it.”

I took my son to a psychologist to talk out his feelings. Though still sullen, he began to recover.

The psychologist told me that he was responding to treatment. He’d gone from mourning to grieving. He was learning to process his inner emotions and handle it himself.

Grieving is what we experience on the inside. Mourning is the outward expression of that grief. We hold that feeling inside of us even when we are not expressing it.

It made sense.

We may grieve for years, but the mourning period is brief. For some of us, it’s as short as a day.

But in reality, you might not feel any better for six to eight weeks. Or years.

The truth is, it’s different for everyone.

Stages of Grief

“Anyone suffering from any type of loss can experience stages of grief.”

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist, and author of the best-selling book, On Death and Dying, introduced the five stages of grief.

These stages are a series of emotions experienced by terminally-ill patients but are not exclusive to the dying. Anyone suffering from any type of loss can experience them. And that’s pretty much all of us.

They are:

• Denial: “This isn’t happening. I refuse to acknowledge it.”
• Anger: “Why the hell is this happening? Who did this?”
• Bargaining: “If you take this, God, I’ll do this….”
• Depression: “I feel too horrible to do anything or care.”
• Acceptance: “Okay, it is what it is.”

Kubler-Ross states that you do not necessarily go through all these stages. In fact, you may go through none of them. How and when you heal is personal.

In 2019, Kubler-Ross’s on Grief and Grieving, co-author David Kessler introduced a new sixth stage: Meaning. In death, it helps us look beyond the pain, suffering, and loss of death to the joys and lessons our loved one left behind.

In the case of a loss such as a divorce or job, it helps us see the value in them, the lessons learned, and give us the benefit of experience so we can do better the next time.

It doesn’t mean we won’t grieve or suffer. It means we recognize that what our loved one did in this life survives death. Their essence and actions continue to vibrate through time, kind of like a ripple effect into eternity.

There was meaning in their death because there was meaning in their lives.

And grief is transformed into something more tangible. And believable.

Your Life after Death

The truth is, you never get over a significant loss or the death of someone you love. But you can find meaning in their lives and overcome the heartache of the initial loss.

The first year is the hardest: the first birthday, first Christmas, first anniversary. With my mother, it wasn’t the raw-open-wounded feeling of the 4th of July, but there’s an emptiness, like an unoccupied chair at the dinner table.

The meaning in her life was becoming apparent. She’d lived to see her only son get married. She’d died exactly how she’d wanted to.

In her house, peacefully and without pain.

She ate what she wanted without any rebuke: chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream and tiramisu. And the best thing of all, as my younger sister put it:

“Mom got to stay in bed, and people come to visit her.”

And mom had never been happy in her body, as beautiful as she was. She left quickly. She didn’t suffer, and she died at home.

My son began to reminisce and smile as he did so.

He missed her more times than others, like bedtime when she rubbed his head. He began to talk about her and to emulate her peculiarities. He started the practice of sarcasm. Something my mother was an expert at.

He jumped out from behind corners to scare his friends. And me.

And he celebrated the 4th of July with more enthusiasm than he had in past years. I think he was celebrating it for two.

Time had done its trick.

With it, we do heal. But we can’t hurry it.

There’s no other way.