What do you say about the second year without your loved one?
July 2, 2023, marks two years since my mom passed away from this earth. It is strange sometimes to write or even to speak these words, to embrace this reality. It is also strange that entering this second year has become an adjustment to her absence, more than the first year. My mom, who for the first twenty-eight years of my life, poured everything into me. When she passed, I immediately felt multiple emotions. Pain? Yes. Shock? Absolutely. I also immediately felt and said to some friends that because my mom poured everything into me, I was not empty.
Death is so strange.
The woman who birthed me and held my hand all twenty-eight years of my life, with whom I shared my heart and she shared hers, laughed and cried, dreamed, and celebrated with, endured the difficult, unpleasant conversations with, and with whom I spoke to multiple times throughout the day, exchanging daily text messages and Bitmojis, and danced too many memories to share, was gone from this earth.
The life that I knew with her was no more.
I felt that God literally carried me in the initial weeks after my mom’s passing (think of the “Footprints in the Sand” poem). The prayers of the people that I knew and those that I didn’t played a pivotal role.
In the first year of my mom’s passing, all twelve months were an adjustment to live without her. I counted down every monthly milestone that I lived without her: August 2 . . . September 2 . . . October 2 . . . November 2 . . .Thanksgiving . . . December 2 . . .Christmas . . . New Year’s Day 2022.
When spring 2022 approached, I gingerly approached the Big 3 milestones: Mom’s birthday (March 22), Mother’s Day (May 8), and her death anniversary (July 2).
As I write this post, I am less than one week away from the second-year anniversary of my mom’s passing. Many feelings have gripped my soul during this month of June, mainly longing to hear my mom’s voice or hearing it as if she were a flashback from a happier time in my childhood. Way back memories merge with the earliest last memories of my mom’s presence.
It is hard to encapsulate those emotions in this post. If you know . . . you understand. Sometimes, it is easier to share less with people the second time around. Maybe it is your nature to withdraw a little during a painful season or while remembering a painful season. Maybe it is strange to say that after living nearly three decades of life with someone that you love dearly, you can adjust twenty-four months without their presence.
Death is indeed strange.
For me, the first year without my mom was a lot of adjusting to her absence, whereas this second year, I have adjusted in that I truly had to acknowledge that my mom was no longer here on this earth.
In 2022, I could say for the first six months of the year that “one year ago today, Mom and I were doing this . . .” But this year, I had no 2022 memories of Mom.
In the past year, sickness abounded in my body more than any other period in my adult life. One of these first bouts of sickness inspired my poem, “Grief Poem # 1” from my latest poetry collection, Cemetery Psalms (2022). Feeling unwell without my mom there to take care of me hit me hard:
I did not want to leave before you,
but I did not want to live without you.
I’m forced to stay without you
in May, June, July— the month you left me.
I’m not empty, but I’m grieving,
an expression of mourning I never experienced
Like that Saturday in September
when invisible hands turned a sharp knife
clockwise into my heart chambers,
perforating into invisible teardrops that my eyes couldn’t form.
The pain is painful,
Yet I marvel at how often you had to close caskets,
saying goodbye to another life that you felt was taken too soon.
Like you this time, it’s me,
but I wanted it to be me.
But Pastor said you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
I believe him.
I love you Mommy,
but I wanted you to stay.
The grief journey continues . . . not with all the sadness and longing of the first year without Mom, but with a greater sensitivity to other people’s grief when loved ones pass away.
I cannot wait until death dies when Jesus Christ reclaims his throne on earth as it is in heaven.
My hope is that my life—especially the pain, grief, and death experienced—is not in vain. Because Jesus said so, because the Bible and its divinely inspired authors said so, I know that I do not run this “race” called life in vain.
I am grateful for those people in my life who have poured into me these past two years, many of whom have walked this grief journey multiple times.
The mercy of the Lord is demonstrated through people. The comfort of the Lord is demonstrated through His people.
I hold on to this scripture whenever I think that my work on earth is done:
Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort where we ourselves are comforted of God (New King James, 2 Corinthians 1.3-4).
How are you doing on your grief journey?