The lessons grief teaches

You can’t prepare for how you’ll respond to loss

One of the hardest things to learn is that everyone responds to loss differently. For some, they alternate between keeping the brave face in public and crying uncontrollably in private. This cycle of over-working and perfectionism in public and uncontrollable private grief can lasted a long time.

Grief isn’t something you “get through”

Grief is a process, it isn’t a journey with a destination. Finding different ways of grieving grief takes many different forms. But I can tell you that this year has been tough. Loss is something that requires processing and it changes over the course of your life, as we do.

Anxiety is often our body’s way of telling us we’re grieving

Often anxiety is related to unprocessed grief. We don’t often allow ourselves to feel sadness and when this happens, it turns into anxiety about something else. This is the body’s way of telling us to listen to the grief, to really tune in. When we allow ourselves the space to sit with our feelings, the anxiety may go down. Therapy can also help enormously with processing the grief.

You always need your mom

Regardless of our stage in life or age, we always need our moms. Whether they were amazing parents or terrible ones, we still miss them. I want her to see me now as a grown up with my own children. We think about the kind of grandmothers they were, or would have been. This is normal and healthy and allows us a new way of processing our grief as adults if we lost our mothers at a young age.

Our mothers were not saints

Our mothers are just human, like the rest of us. Often they become saints when the pass away. This is also really normal and enables us to process the grief we feel for someone so important in our lives. Through therapy, reflection and insight, we can see that our mothers were flawed and fallible, human. That they made mistakes and that while that doesn’t make our grief any less, it can certainly lessen any guilt we feel about being angry with them for being less than stellar parents.

We don’t have to follow in our mothers’ footsteps

We don’t have to make the same choices our moms made and that we can carve out our own paths in life. The pain of losing our mothers can be a new phone, an opportunity to carve out our own professional paths, become mothers ourselves, forge relationships and be proud of the women we’ve become.