Kristen’s Story

Grief and joy can coexist. It’s okay if all you did today was hold on. No one worries about you like your mother and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe. You cannot turn to her anymore and it changes your life forever. These were some of the many words shared with me not long after my own mother died at 74, but of all the wisdom that was imparted on to me, this has stuck with me the most.

Death came for her long before any of us were ready for it. She got sick the way anyone gets sick in the winter; a cold she couldn’t shake. Bronchitis, said the local urgent care. It was early in 2021, the height of COVID and so long as you had a negative test (in her case, several), then you were seemingly good to go. It wasn’t until a trip to ER told us something much worse: a heart attack caused a backup of fluid in her lungs. It led to a pneumonia so severe that she became septic. Her kidneys began to fail shortly after. The prognosis was grim, but far from over. She tried, my God did she try, but I watched my strong, resilient mother deteriorate, her dignity fading alongside it. She endured five months of hospitals, two rehabilitation facilities, a brief return home for a few bleak weeks until a trip to the ER ended up being the last one.

Her lungs were failing her. There was little left that could have been done and she never recovered. It’s as simple as that, and yet so unbelievably complex. On August 25th, 2021 at 9:45 PM, her journey ended. When we received her death certificate, the cause of death was listed as shortness of breath. So many of our questions remain unanswered and there are days I find myself wishing it just could have been cancer or any other diagnosis. Something I could wrap my arms around, something that could give me the peace I desperately long for. Shortness of breath is not enough; it never will be.

Then come the questions. Did I do enough? Did I fight hard enough? Did I say enough? So much of her time in those final months were spent in solitude because of COVID. It’s naïve to think about it now, but death was never an option for her; how would I have done it differently if I knew time was running out? It begs a larger existential question I’m not quite sure I want to answer.  

Being a motherless mother to my own little girl is now my journey and this path is filled with more fear than I expected. It can leave more questions than answers and sometimes I want to shout to the heavens, “am I doing this right?!” It’s often filled with the kind of solitude that no one can fill; not your husband, not your siblings, not your best friends. Like the words that were imparted on to me, the world seems unsafe, and I very often feel lost within it and my own motherhood journey.

And as a year approaches, this invisible yet giant milestone whispers that I should be done. Done with the grief, you’ve made it through 365 days. You survived the year of firsts and you’re about to be on the other side. The other side of what exactly? Because out of all these words and all these tears and all these questions, all that I have learned is that grief is sneaky. It will swallow you whole without warning while some days, it will skid the surface, barely making a ripple. I question the logic; I wonder when it will stop although I know it never will.

Then I repeat to myself: Grief and joy can coexist. A reminder of what I hope is on the other side.