The “anger stage”

You know the thing that bothers me the most about the “stages of grief”? It’s not that it’s linear, or seems time limited. It’s not that it even seems so clean and tidy. It’s that we’re supposed to do the stages in a particular order. And that order doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me because I’ve been without my mom for 27 years and I’m still pissed about it. I’ve had a ton of therapy. I’ve done lots of personal work. This isn’t some moral failure on my part. I still go through periods where I am angry about how she died and everything that happened to me afterwards.

I’m angry my girls won’t know their grandmother. I was angry that I had to have back surgery in 2018 without my mom. I’m angry I don’t get to spend Christmases with her. I’m angry that I don’t to ask her any of the 1,000,000 questions I have. I carry this anger with me and I resent people telling me to “let it go”. I’m not sure I could even if I wanted to.

Do you go through periods of being angry? Does something come up and you stop and think, what the hell? How did this happen? Why my mom? Why is this still so tough after so much time?

My biggest takeaway from therapy in the last few years is that this is a process. My grief changes as I get older and my life changes. As my eldest daughter gets closer to being a teenager (a particularly difficult time for me), my grief morphs into something else, something closer to anger again. Looks like I’m going to have more to talk to my therapist about after all.