18 Years Is A Long Time To Be Dead

When I started writing about grief and my losses, I didn’t foresee how often I would get asked the question, “how does this change your relationship to death?”.

In conversation, death was centered from the beginning. My mom’s death spoken of more than her life. The death of who I had been was seemingly pushed aside to make room for who the world needed me to be immediately after.

At the start of my time with grief, the question wasn’t explicit, instead at 10 years old, I was asked,

“How has your mom’s death impacted you this year?”

I’m a boat in the middle of waves that take me wherever they please. That’s what I wish I would have had the confidence to say, but I was 10 years old, so of course I didn’t.

Instead, “I don’t know.”

Instead, “I’m fine.”

Instead, silence because the only times I had been honest had traumatized me into not speaking truth again.

Like that time in the therapist’s office a handful of months after my mom died.

I had bravely walked towards the woman when she called my name from the door that separated the clinic’s offices from the waiting room. My pediatrician had recommended her to my uncle and I loved my pediatrician because she had always given me more than one sticker, so I went in good faith.

“Can you tell me more about your mom, Vivian?”

“After school sometimes when she did get out of work early we would drive to Avon to pick up boxes of things she sold,” I said.

“Did she used to do a lot of things with you?”

“My mom worked 6 days, my uncle would pick me up at school, but sometimes my mom would take me to work with her on the weekends.”

And years ago that’s when the tears started and as an adult, when I think back to this moment, when they start now.

“My uncle has to sign my book logs now for school. I want her to be around to do things with me. I miss her so much and I don’t like it.”

In between giving me a tissue and staring at me like she didn’t know what to do with me, the way most adults had done when I was honest, my new therapist said: