I’ve been pretty quiet lately. Frankly, it’s because I’ve been drowning in grief. I don’t know what makes this week special: it isn’t my daughter’s birthday or yahrzeit. There’s no special milestone related to her that takes place at the beginning of March. I just suddenly cannot see past how much I miss her, and how unfair it is that she isn’t here.

That’s the thing about grief: it’s always there. You never “move past it” or “heal” or truly accept it. It’s more like a wound that develops a scab. Suddenly, you bump your knee and accidentally rip off the scab. I went from joking about the reality of her deadness (“she’s the quietest kid we have”) on Monday to sobbing uncontrollably about never getting to hold her again on Tuesday. I cannot shake the thought that Baby Girl is the daughter I’d always imagined having if I became a mother – clever, spunky, fearless – but The OG is the daughter I actually want. Can you imagine how uniquely terrible it feels to look at your own perfect daughter and silently wish she was someone else?

People have this desire to cheer you up when you’re grieving. It comes from a place of love, but really? Why should I ever be cheered by any part of my daughter’s death? I vacillate between atheism and agnosticism, so there is no “joy” at my daughter being “in Heaven with Jesus.” As if that would comfort a mother who believes with every cell of her body that her child should be with her. There is no better place than here with me.

It is absolutely natural for your bones to ache at their distance from a child you created inside of them. It is normal to rage at the earth’s audacity to continue spinning on its axis without your child on it. No hug or meme or clever saying will ever change that, or the fact that my daughter is dead. And so I go quiet: I let emails and phone calls go unanswered, and mute the group chats. In these moments of grief, I have nothing to give.

I will say that I’m past the stage where I replay every pivotal moment during her hospitalization where things could have been different: the code events, the fluid removal, the nurse on her lunch break, the stitches tearing out of her mitral valve. Now, my mind goes to all the moments I wish she was here for. I marvel at and lament how much her baby sister looks like her. I wonder what her shock of black hair would look like now. If she’d still have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. Would we still dance around the living room to Paul Simon’s Graceland every morning? Would she still giggle when her daddy threatened to put her in the sink?

I will literally never know. And it’s the not knowing that gets me. Just like those last few days in the hospital with her, when we didn’t know if she would live or die. It is the not knowing that tortures you.

Are you or a person you love grieving?

I’d like to recommend three resources that made me feel less alone and crazy during the earliest days of being a shakula. First, Refuge in Grief has support for grieving people and teaches the folks who love them to be better supports. It’s curated by the author of the second resource, Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand. This book helped me identify the anger I felt each time someone who cared for me hit me with a platitude (“Everything happens for a reason”).

And finally, When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner helped quiet the spiritual rage that regularly bubbled over in the months after my daughter’s death. I send all three to people who have recently lost a child. Even if a person never reads them, I like to think that they are a physical reminder to the recipient, that they are cared for and not fully alone in their grief.

Also, no, I’m not Jewish. Judaism just has the words and good resources for parents grieving the death of a child.

Tierra

A malcontent with a heart of gold, Tierra is a first-year medical student, former high school teacher and history PhD candidate, plus mom to four of Bebe’s baddest kids. She curses a lot. Tierra is a DC native but lives in southwest Michigan and will happily exchange writing (hers) for cash (yours).