How do you grieve when you’ve never learnt how to actually do it?

Losing a parent early in your life creates a total upheaval in the learned processes of grief. Here’s how losing my mum has affected me way more than I ever knew.

As a child, when you see adults crying about the death of your mother whilst you don’t feel any sadness, it’s bound to mess up your understanding of loss itself. A few of my earliest memories in life involve people going through tremendous amounts of grief. The first was immediately after my mum passed away; she was in palliative care and on her final day, we left the hospice in a car with some other family members. My cousin was hysterical in the back seat next to me but I didn’t cry. I understood the expectation that I would be deeply affected her loss, and this would be a running theme throughout my childhood, but in this particular moment, the emotions weren’t there.

I was 5 years old. I remember the hospice fondly, we often got sweet treats and there were intriguing smells that I didn’t recognise from anywhere else. I never understood why we were there until the day we left, and that memory remains so clear in my mind. I remember the moment I knew she wasn’t coming back, my mind seemed to go to a place it had never gone before. There was absolute clarity in the situation, it was as if I had matured for just a couple of seconds, enough to take in all the context and read the cues, and then I fell back into the innocence of being a toddler.

I don’t remember much from the weeks following my mum’s death, I imagine I was sheltered from much of the misery in the family. I do remember the funeral, or at least a snippet of it. There was a lady who was speaking about my mum. It was probably the first time I had seen someone break down to the point that words could no longer escape their mouth. I remember thinking she was looking at me, her tear-filled eyes crying out for someone to wrap their arms around me and protect that poor child. It made me sad to see this woman so upset, had I done something wrong? Had my mum done something wrong? There were many questions in my mind, all of them would be lost in time.

I suppose the exposure to other people’s grief was my introduction to how we’re supposed to deal with loss. In theory it is a healthy thing to show to children who have lost someone close to them, however it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, no matter how well you explain it. A child won’t linger on a particular emotion for too long, allowing them to render each day as unremarkable as the next. So even though the idea of death and grief can be understood, the complexities of these concepts will never be explored deeply enough in early childhood for the person to really come to terms with.

Throughout my life, the loss of my mum would just hang over me. For most of my friends, it was an unspeakable subject that would kill the mood, and for me it was exactly the same. I would never bring her up in conversation as people would get sad or uncomfortable. For those who asked about her, I would try speaking freely but my main goal was convincing them I was okay, without considering whether I was.

I know very little about the woman who gave birth to me. Over the years there have been moments where people have asked questions about her and I haven’t known the answers. Now I’m figuring out that it’s up to me to find out who she was; I am scared of what I’ll uncover. I’m scared not in what I’ll discover about my mum, but in what is hiding behind the cool exterior I have created for myself.

As a child watching that woman break down by the altar, I knew I never wanted to feel like that. That same child within has protected me from grief as I’ve gone through life, he has also deprived me of its embrace. It’s not about letting go or getting over it, it’s about discovering how I really feel. I have always neglected that, but for my own sake I want to get closer to my mum again. In bringing myself back and finding out who she was, I’m sure to create a deep sense of sadness that this woman has not been there for me. Until now, I have never realised my coping mechanism has been to deny my connection to her by locking her away. Maybe by reconnecting with my mum, I can set the child carrying this weight of lingering grief free.

In writing this piece, I reached out to someone who was an old friend of my mum. She has some pictures of her and we are going to meet up in the new year and look at them together. The thought of it is making me really emotional, and I haven’t told my dad or my sister about it yet. I feel like this is something I need to do myself and I don’t want to pretend I’m unaffected by the whole thing.

By stripping down the sturdy exterior that grief could not penetrate, I am removing the want to escape by other means. The alcohol, drugs, gambling, I don’t seek to inebriate myself with them anymore. Speckles of grief seeped through the cracks of my despair in addiction and at the time I thought it was just another negative consequence. Yet, what if grief was trying to save me? To pull me back from the clutches of addiction, and from a road which led further away from enlightenment.

The emotions are coming to the surface now, I feel vulnerable, but strong too. The fact that recovery has brought me to the decision to reconnect with my mum makes me so thankful that I’ve been through this. When things were really bad, I had thoughts of reconnecting through suicide, maybe then I’d have got to know her without the pain. In death I would know just as little about the woman who nurtured me as a baby as I do now. It is only in living life that I can feel, connect, and grow closer to her, and closer to myself.