It Does Get Better, but Hearing it From Someone Else Still Sucks
I owe an apology to my therapist: she suggested that I try journaling, and I retorted that it was silly. But here I am, 280 days after my mom passed away, channeling my grief in print. Since that day, I have become a different person, and this is my attempt to elucidate the meaning of losing her, reflect on the coping choices I made, and chart a path forward.
I am hesitant to discuss her death not because of death itself but how she dropped out of my life without warning. It was the first week of the spring semester; I was still riding the high of my previous semester abroad. Then came the hospitalization: a grim diagnosis. Roughly a week later, she was gone. She was gone before I could even arrange travel back to China, pause my academics, and situate my swirling mind. You see, I thought I still had more time—however limited—to make a drastic adjustment. Instead, it was like riding my favorite rollercoaster to the very top, expecting a safe and measured thrill, only to have the tracks suddenly disappear and find myself dangling precipitously mid-air.
And there was considerable uncertainty: I am no longer a Chinese citizen, and my visa had conveniently expired. The saying “desperate times call for desperate measures” had never been more apt. Upon realizing that visa appointments at the Chinese embassy were extremely backlogged, I booked the earliest appointment possible, Photoshopped the confirmation, and took the train to DC with my “updated” timeslot. It worked. (Please, don’t tell the embassy staff.)
It's so funnily cruel, isn’t it? Yet those are the clearest details I remember, among a couple more. When I try to explain the feeling of spring semester, I can only muster that, after the death, it was a blurry void. I took two weeks off and returned to school. The numbness had overpowered any other way to cope with my mom ceasing to exist. I bolted for the option that I thought would enable my running away from facing reality. Besides, I thought to myself, why would I have wanted to sit around in my childhood home, walk by the bedroom where she was slowly dying without anyone’s knowledge, and have no friends to visit? In retrospect, I erred. Heavily.
ARIANNA STEWART // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
This is not an advice piece, but if you are or find yourself dealing with grief, take as much time off as possible. My pride held me back from the idea of graduating a semester late; instead of having a designated time and space to sit with my emotions, I was crying before, between, and after classes. I cried so much and so regularly that it triggered frequent nosebleeds—and that, my friends, is not fun. To make matters worse, I convinced myself to continue with a research assistant job that demanded intense reading and writing. The pay was great (maybe the best at W&M), but my mental state? You can surmise.
With more deadlines and expectations came an increasingly limited capacity to reckon with my new reality. I found myself in a state of “floating,” as the semester felt never-ending, and support manifested fleetingly (When I mentioned a grief support group I had heard about to my therapist, she replied that they no longer offered it due to lack of interest. I suppose that’s a positive thing, but terrible for me).
College is an extremely inconvenient place to grieve. Your professors may cut you some slack, but the workload will catch up with you eventually. Then there’s the fear of alienating your friends and, worse, watching them move on with their lives while I was still dangling from that rollercoaster. Forcibly re-immersing myself into a typical college student’s life still carried the concomitant expectation of socializing—and it brought great disappointment. My friends knew what was going on, but the way they responded varied drastically. Nobody our age is prepared to comfort somebody in great distress; we merely know to deploy trite reassurances that shield us from truly listening and understanding someone’s pain. A close friend remarked that one of the worst things you could say to comfort someone was, “I don’t know what to say.” Absolutely. As a culture, we don’t know how to talk about death, and saying those common phrases makes it more difficult to have an honest dialogue about grief and loss. In those conversations, it felt like the onus was on me to dump my tragedy or not be able to talk about it at all. And that is inherently unfair. Hence, the initial numbness gradually morphed into intense, sustained anger. This fact rendered a suffocating loneliness that turned college into a constraint, a place that could not successfully help me cope with the debilitating physical and mental aftershocks of losing a loved one. Although I had a handful of people who could offer solace and temporary detachment from grief, the toughest lesson of all is that you will have to persevere through such hardship alone.
How do I begin to describe the sensation of losing a parent? I couldn’t, and I still can’t. Picking the push-forward-with-school option forced me to contend with bitter disappointment, deep guilt, and inadequacy head-on—for better or worse. To put it lightheartedly, I involuntarily signed up for some serious character-building that involved tearing my life apart and having to mend it back together. But to see it plainly, I may have been blindsided by overwhelming stress and inadvertently placed more stress on myself.
I intend for this narrative to mark the immediate aftermath of grappling with her loss—sifting through the whirlwind of events and emotions that threatened to wreck me last semester. Rather than conceptualizing my mom solely around her death, as time passes, I hope to attain what some researchers on bereavement have articulated: grief is a process whereby it “gradually moves from preoccupying the mind to residing comfortably in the heart.” There is still plenty to discover about my mom for who she was before becoming my mom. The negative emotions have mostly settled down, serving as the impetus for a more heartful reckoning about myself and what family means to me.