died mother essay

My mother's death isn't something I survived. It's something I'm still living through.

For years, I’d assumed I would be completely incapable of functioning after my mom died. I had no idea what my life would or even could look like after that. I couldn’t imagine it, just like I couldn’t imagine, when I was a kid, what it would be like to drive a car or go to college or even just be a grown up; it felt like I would just have to cease to exist when she did.

And yet, here I am, two and a half years after my mom’s death on May 15, 2018. I don’t know if I’m thriving, or even “surthriving,” a term that makes me think of a preternaturally peppy Molly Shannon character on “Saturday Night Live.” But at least I’m no longer sleeping with the lights on while the Mel and Sue years of “The Great British Baking Show” drone on at the edges of my consciousness … most of the time, anyway.

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I didn’t do anything in particular to survive her death except continue to stay alive. I certainly haven’t processed the pain, and I doubt I ever fully will; it’s all simmering just beneath my skin, ready to escape at the next Instagram story from The Dodo about interspecies friendship.

Immediately after her death, there were things that had to be done — writing an obituary, canceling her credit cards and hiring an estate attorney. And I did them; they filled some time. I had help — a lawyer, friends, family, the health aide who became a second daughter to her and a sister to me. Plus Mom had been very organized; she’d even prepared a list of all of her logins for me. Logistically, it was as easy as a death could be.

The most important thing I learned about grief is that it isn’t linear, and it isn’t logical.

But at the end of the day, I was her only child. And she was my only mom. And she was gone. Just gone.

So I let her answering machine fill up with messages, because I couldn’t cope. No one sat shivah for her in Texas; I didn’t even know where to begin to organize that. I had a panic attack in the housewares section of Target.

In the months after that, I declined a lot of social invitations; I whiffed deadlines; I stayed up all night playing video games and listening to true crime podcasts by myself. In short, whatever remaining concerns I had about meeting most societal norms went out the window.

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It wasn’t all terrible; there were small mercies that I’ll never forget. Even when I was at my worst, my loved ones did what they could to soothe the unbearable. My friends came and sat shivah with me in New York City when I arrived home, filling my apartment with carbohydrates and flowers. They flew to me when I needed them but couldn’t say. They took me into their homes when I showed up; or they took me hiking along the Pacific Ocean or to karaoke.

Still, my grief cruelly took away my ability to concentrate on books, movies or even any TV shows that required more than the bare minimum of intellectual processing. I had nothing left to invest emotionally or intellectually in anything I normally loved — or even anything I was once pleasantly distracted by. I struggled to pitch my editors. I flubbed an interview with a celebrity so disastrously I still think about it late at night.

Eventually, I allowed myself the luxury of going to therapy twice a week instead of just once.

If this all sounds awfully familiar to you, it’s because we’re all grieving in some way.

The most important thing I learned about grief is that it isn’t linear, and it isn’t logical. You have to be very careful with yourself and with who you’re around, and you have to make sure they’re extra tender to you, too. Even the most big-hearted people will do or say the wrong thing; I still do it myself. Most of their missteps are forgivable, but you’ll decide which ones aren’t, and that’s important, too.

Special bonds were formed in the last two years between me and the friends who’ve also experienced the loss of their mothers; it’s a very particular, complicated sort of loss that can feel extra messy and ugly. And, let’s face it, not many people can tolerate hearing about the disgusting indignities of aging and death unless they get paid by the hour — nor should they. There is also a kind of relief that you feel after a death like that, and the relief feels shameful, but even the shame feels like a relief, sort of like popping a pimple.

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I’m no longer scared when the phone rings (mostly). When a famous person dies, I no longer calculate how much older or younger they were than my mom, as if that somehow affected her odds of survival. Dead parents, it turns out, are great ice breakers on first dates and at cocktail parties. I’m thankfully off the hook for airport travel over the winter holidays. When certain dates roll around — like the anniversary of my parents’ respective deaths — I’m not sad so much as simply disassociated.

If this all sounds awfully familiar to you, it’s because we’re all grieving in some way. We’ve collectively experienced wave after wave of loss in the past nine months, and it scares me to think of how shattering it will be once the constant flow of news and tragedy relents just a little.

I didn’t do anything in particular to survive her death except continue to stay alive.

This sounds horrible but, without the death of my mom — and specifically the experience of grieving her death — I wouldn’t have emotionally or mentally survived the pandemic. While I’m still no expert at tolerating discomfort, I’m better at it than I used to be; there’s not much else to do when you’re laying sideways across your bed at 4 a.m. staring at your cat and feeling desperately, bitterly lonely, except to feel desperately, bitterly lonely.

Plus, now I don’t have to worry about her during the pandemic; she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and an increasingly knotty conflagration of disorders that would have made her an over-the-top risk for Covid-19, and she lived in Texas. She worried about me all the time anyway, even when there wasn’t an airborne virus ravaging us, and I’d have felt guilty for worrying her, and she’d want me to move back to Dallas, and, well, we’ve all seen “Grey Gardens,” right?

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In the before-times, when I was on a subway stopped between stations, I’d try to sense the millisecond it began to lurch back into motion, until I could no longer tell the difference between standing still and moving. Grief is like that, but with fury and fear and sadness and a terrifying blankness that nothing can soothe. You can’t tell when the subway will start moving again; you can’t magic it into motion. You can only wait and see what happens, and make sure you’re holding on when it starts moving again.

You won’t believe the kinds of things you can survive. I didn’t. I still don’t.

More from our project on surviving 2020 and what comes next:

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Jenni Miller is a freelance writer who covers movies, TV, sex, love, death, video games and assorted weirdness for a variety of publications online and in print.

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My Mother Died When I Was 7. I’m Grieving 37 Years Later.

Delayed grief is sometimes triggered by an event later in life, experts say.

By Nicole Johnson

I’m in my basement looking for a file when I stumble upon the cards and pictures — a small manila envelope containing what is left of my mother. She died at 30 in an apartment in Van Nuys, Calif., in April 1983. I don’t even know the exact date.

My brother and I were told that her biker boyfriend, a guy named Eddie, found her dead in the shower. I was 7.

I lived with my grandparents, my state-appointed guardians in my mother’s absence, in a city 15 minutes outside of Boston. After school and on many weekends, I was also cared for by my foster mother, Esther. The state paid for her to help my grandparents. It was also the state that had removed my brother and me from the apartment we shared with my mother, Denise, just before my first birthday. Denise was an addict.

Her fall in the shower, I later learned, actually happened during a seizure brought on by constant drug use. She died of an overdose.

Back in the present, I pore over the relics: a letter my mother wrote to me and my brother, another to my grandmother just before my mother was about to enter the rehab she never made it to, a picture of her on her 21st birthday and some things from high school. The pieces of my mother’s life are spread in front of me like a mixed-up jigsaw puzzle. I wipe at my eyes, surprised to find tears. I never cry about my mother so I wonder, why now? I am a 44-year-old woman, a mother to four children. The woman I never actually called “Mom” has been dead for more than 37 years. That is longer than she was alive.

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Why the Death of Your Mother Is a Life-Changing Event

Shock, relief, loneliness, and gratitude, perhaps all at once..

Posted December 29, 2022 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

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Regardless of the quality of the relationship, losing your mother is a major life event. Many people fear the grieving process; grieving your mother’s death will turn that process on its head. The known becomes unknown, the predictable becomes uncertain, and warring emotions compete–starting immediately with the shock that someone so integral to your presence can suddenly just be gone.

Though our brains are astounding in their ability to adapt to changing circumstances, that skill can complicate the grieving process. The thread of a mother’s existence runs throughout your life, humming in the background from childhood through adulthood. It doesn’t matter if you struggled to get along or found her to be your best friend; even for those who never knew their biological mother, her death will be momentous.

Coping With Shock

If your mother was a significant part of your life, her death will somehow bring everything to a screeching halt while life continues to march forward. The world around you will change, seasons will pass, and holidays will fly by, but your world may seem to stop. Your brain will be forced to grasp how someone can be present in every way but also physically gone forever – a dissonance that creates significant stress and anxiety .

The first days after the death of your mother are filled with the mechanisms of survival mode: finding the will to shower, making the plans that accompany death, remembering to eat, and reminding yourself to keep breathing. Those days will pass in a blur, and later you may look back at them with little to no memory of what happened – a completely normal reaction to your body's shock.

As you progress through waves of shock and sadness, you may be in awe at the depth of your grief . It can come on gradually and suddenly. There will be triggers you are aware of and may even seek out, just to get a release on the emotions building up in your chest. There will also be triggers that come out of nowhere and stun you into instant sorrow. You will be surprised at how quickly tears form, with no warning.

Physiological Reactions

Physiological reactions like crying, rapid breathing, digestive issues, and more are the body’s natural way of coming to terms with enormous change. Without these reactions, there would be no outlet for emotions that are too intense to handle otherwise. The process of shock is intimately wrapped up in these reactions: Your body is a pro at connecting the logical dots and making things work, but when it’s trying to navigate the abstract nature of powerful grief, it becomes symptomatic.

Your body will do its best to protect you from the immediate, terrorizing pain of your mother’s loss. As part of its shock reaction, you may find yourself behaving normally and wondering why you don’t feel more sadness, anger , or really anything at all. You may be swimming in the depths of numbness and brain fog . You will likely find sleep to be suddenly unpredictable, and your thoughts may become strangers.

When the Numbness Wears Off

The initial numbness of your mother’s death will eventually wear off. It happens in pieces, one wave at a time, and the feelings that follow will be some of the most extreme you'll ever experience. Anger, guilt , resentment, relief, misery, despair — there are no limits to the emotions that will flood your body and mind. Many people wander in and out of shock for months (and sometimes years) as their minds try to work through these emotions while still going through the motions of living.

Once the loss sinks in, you may feel breathtaking loneliness . You may now be the first of the line, staring your own mortality in the face. You are not as removed from death as the presence of your mother led you to believe, and her absence will be glimmering behind every object, every action, and every thought.

You will feel suddenly and irrevocably responsible for the future. You may experience a crushing weight of “what if” that leaves you almost breathless. There is no longer a mother to bounce ideas off of, call when you’re upset, or get affirmation from. You’re on your own now. You have to be your own cheerleader, support, and shoulder to cry on — and you have to do it all while continuing to live your best life. The responsibility can be grueling.

While adjusting to your foundation crumbling, your emotions will often turn against you. You will suddenly remember every argument, every wasted moment, and every missed opportunity, and you may experience paralyzing regret.

Just as your mind recognizes there is no going back, your emotions may urge you to take up residence in the past. Despite their futility, guilt and condemnation often become a way to cope with the intense pain of your mother’s death.

Moments of Hope

Though it’s nearly impossible to believe, all will not be negative. You may feel relief, particularly if your mother struggled with chronic conditions that will no longer plague her. You may feel released from the conflict or pressure that came with a caregiving relationship. You may even feel a renewed sense of gratitude for your own life and a sharpened ambition to soak up every minute available to you and your remaining loved ones. Death can knit together as much as it can tear apart.

Your mother’s death will change you. That change is likely the only predictable part of the entire process – a process that will break, overwhelm, and rebuild you. The only way out is through, riding each wave as it comes and, through it all, remembering to breathe and keep moving forward.

Facebook image: PeopleImages.com - Yuri A/Shutterstock

Jamie Cannon, MS, LPC, specializes in the treatment of trauma, anxiety, and grief with populations ranging from children and families to victims of domestic violence.

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Mothers’ Day grief: What this day means when you’ve lost your own mom

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To all the mamas who have lost their mamas.

By Darnise C. Martin May 3, 2022

The Mother’s Day season always greets me with angst and bits of unresolved grief. Some years are better than others. If you are dealing with grief from the loss of a mother and this is a difficult time for you, I have a word to share.

My mother died in the winter of 1988. I was a 20-year-old college student, and I had just returned to school following our Christmas holiday break. My mother had recently had a hysterectomy and was having complications, none of which seemed serious. But when I got that phone call on a February morning at 5 a.m., I knew it was bad. My stepfather called and told me to get home as quickly as possible. In a frenzy, I got myself back to Dallas, TX where we had been living for the past few years. I was too late though. She had already passed away by the time I landed in the airport.

The following week threw me into a state of shock and grief from which I would never fully recover. I have shared many of these details in a memoir called, “ Mother Loss: Reflections On Grief ,” which I began writing as a way to process my own heartbreak and confusion. In that book, I talk about the reverberations of my mother’s sudden death on my whole family. For a good while, we were all broken. 

Related: Mother’s Day is complicated

For me, each Mother’s Day season brings up varying degrees of grief and nostalgia. Each Mother’s Day, I am reminded that I don’t have a mother , and with that realization I find gritty bits of grief mixed with a flood of memories and emotions that I’m not sure I want to revisit. 

For those of us who are motherless daughters, you may recognize this experience as a slice of your life too. Some of us don’t know what to do with ourselves on Mother’s Day. We see our friends and strangers going through the rituals of buying gifts for their mothers, making reservations for brunch or dinner. We hear our friends lamenting how their relationship with their mother is complicated or they express gratitude that they have a close and loving relationship, and how they don’t know what they would do without her. 

Some of them ask us, “How do you cope on Mother’s Day when your own mother has passed away?” Sometimes I reply, “Oh, is it Mother’s Day? I forgot.”  Sometimes it’s that kind of year where I have ignored all the cues and marketing campaigns and busied myself with my work or personal projects, and so the day slipped into the back of my mind. Other times, I respond with, “It’s always hard and surreal not to have a mother, but especially so at this time. I just keep going.” Every Mother’s Day brings its own realizations, memories, melancholia and sometimes a surprising contentment.  

From the time my mother died, I have had a recurring dream/nightmare in which I would unexpectedly see her out in a public place, and I would chase after her, calling for her to turn around and tell me where she had been. I could never catch up to her and I never got an answer. After several years of this randomly occurring dream, I finally had one where I found her sitting on a couch in someone’s house, and I was able to talk to her. She answered my questions. She had not in fact left me, she said, she was always there. When I woke up, I knew that I had turned a corner in the grief of losing my mom. My intense longing had been quenched. I began to feel that I could make room for peace around her death, and maybe even let my emotional guard down.

The grief from losing your mom is unique. The umbilical cord that we once shared with our biological mothers gave us more than nutrients, it also connected us to her heartbeat, her life’s blood, the marrow from her bones. She provides life from the moment of conception. Mothers who foster, adopt or otherwise care for children pour into them as well from their inner resources. 

Related: The hard lessons I’ve learned about grief

After my mother’s funeral, I remember wondering how I could physically remain alive without her. I was in full-on grief mode, feeling the anguish of her absence, and I floundered. Part of the grief of losing your mother is the realization that we are not just without a mother in the physical sense, but also the feeling that we are unmothered as a state of being, bereft without ongoing maternal nurturance and support in a world where being mothered is the norm. My attempted remedy to that longing was to collect other people’s mothers. 

I felt fortunate that I had close friends who invited me to share their mothers, especially during holidays. Now, that doesn’t feel as necessary. Now, I am comforted by the presence of my own mother when I see our resemblance reflected in the mirror and by the similarities in our mannerisms. In this way, my grief from losing my mother feels less acute and more like a tender spot that marks the natural bumps, bruises and heartbreaks of life. My spirituality enables me to connect with her as an ancestor. By reconnecting in this way, I realize that I am not actually unmothered. I am the embodiment of her. I quite literally embody her existence and keep her in the present. 

I bring her with me into any space I enter. I find myself using her words and inflections when I speak to the college students I teach. I had always imagined that if I ever had a daughter, I would somehow download her maternal presence into the ways that I mother. My daughter’s name would have been Catherine, named after her grandmother.

Being a mother without a mother must take on challenges when she is not here helping with the routine, mundane and joyful things of raising a child. I don’t have children of my own, and it seems to me that it offers a unique bittersweet opportunity to be able to pour into your own child what you received from your mother, grandmother and great-grandmothers. Mother’s Day provides an opportunity to intentionally share your mother with your child. Mother’s Day can become the day that you serve as a bridge between your child and your mother. 

Ultimately, how we as motherless daughters navigate the Mother’s Day season is as individual as we each are, but my experience says that we can transform our grief into an empowering way of being. I offer these suggestions for the season:

• Recall and celebrate her traits that give you strength, courage, determination and compassion.
• Continue learning from her life experiences—Gather stories about who she was as a girl. How did she navigate early obstacles? Where are the similarities you share with her?
• What can you do in her honor? Do it on Mother’s Day.
• Create a home altar and place some of her favorite things there with a candle, glass of water and a picture. Recall fond memories there.

I keep an altar with a couple of pieces of jewelry on it that reflect not only her love of jewelry, but also a way that we connect via the sharing of the pieces. Some days, I wear the rings that usually remain on the altar, taking her with me out into the world. 

From one motherless daughter to another, I encourage you to find ways to keep your best mama memories alive.

You can find out more about my journey in my book “ Mother Loss: Reflections On Grief .”

Darnise C. Martin, Ph.D. is a Professor, Author, and Life Transformation Coach with 15 years of training and experience in helping people create Whole Life Abundance. Dr. Darnise has a life-long passion for helping people tap into their spiritual connections for authentic transformation in the areas of Relationships, Spirituality, Life Purpose and Career, Self-Worth, and Well-Being. She is the author of multiple books, including Mother Loss: Reflections on Grief. You can join Dr. Darnise’s community at www.reflectionsonloss.com

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“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” ~Joan Didion

This spring marked ten years since I lost my mother . One ordinary Thursday, she didn’t show up to work, and my family spent a blur of days frantically hanging missing person fliers, driving all over New England, and hoping against reason for a happy outcome.

My mother was prone to frequent mood swings, but she also talked to my two older brothers and me multiple times a day, and going off the grid was completely out of character. How does someone just vanish? And why?

Forty days is a long time to brood over worst-case scenarios: murder, kidnap, dissociative fugue cycled through my addled mind. I gave in to despair but always managed to buoy myself up with hope . My mom was my best friend, and at twenty years old, I needed her too much to lose her. She simply had to come home.

Six weeks later, my brother called. Right up front he said he loved me—a sure sign bad news was coming. There was no way to say what he had to say next, so he just spat it out like sour milk: our mother’s body had been found.

A diver checking moorings in a cold New England harbor had spotted something white on the ocean floor. That white whale was our mom’s station wagon. She had driven off the end of a pier. We didn’t say the word suicide, but we both thought it, failed to comprehend it.

It’s been ten years since that terrible spring. Much of it still doesn’t make sense to me, but a decade has softened the rawness of my grief and allowed moments of lightness to find their way back into my life, the way sunrise creeps around the edges of a drawn window shade.

Losing someone to suicide makes you certain you’ll never see another sunrise, much less appreciate one. It isn’t true. I’m thirty years old now and my life is bigger, scarier, and more fulfilling than I ever could have imagined. Grief helped get me here.

Grief is not something you can hack. There is no listicle that can reassemble your busted heart. But I have found that grieving can make your life richer in unexpected ways. Here are ten truths the biggest loss of my life has taught me:

1. Dying is really about living.

At my mother’s memorial, I resented everyone who said some version of that old platitude, “Time heals all wounds.” Experience has taught me that time doesn’t offer a linear healing process so much as a slowly shifting perspective.

In the first raw months and years of grieving, I pushed away family and friends, afraid that they would leave too. With time, though, I’ve forged close relationships and learned to trust again. Grief wants you to go it alone, but we need others to light the way through that dark tunnel.

2. No one will fill that void.

I have a mom-shaped hole in my heart. Turns out it’s not a fatal condition, but it is a primal spot that no one will ever fill. For a long time, I worried that with the closest relationship in my life suddenly severed, I would never feel whole again. Who would ever understand me in all the ways my mother did?

These days I have strong female role models in my life, but I harbor no illusions that any of them will take my mom’s place. I’ve slowly been able to let go of the guilt that I was replacing or dishonoring her by making room for others. Healing is not an act of substituting, but of expanding, despite the holes we carry.

3. Be easy on yourself.  

In the months after losing my mother, I was clumsy, forgetful and foggy. I can’t recall any of the college classes I took during that time. Part of my grieving process entailed beating myself up for what I could not control, and my brain fog felt like yet another failure.

In time, the fog lifted and my memories returned. I’ve come to see this as my mind going into survival mode with its own coping mechanisms.

Being kind to myself has never been my strong suit, and grief likes to make guilt its sidekick. Meditation, yoga , and journaling are three practices that help remind me that kindness is more powerful than listening to my inner saboteur.

4. Use whatever works.  

I’m not a Buddhist, but I find the concept of letting go and not clinging to anything too tightly to be powerful.

I don’t read self-help, but I found solace in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking .

I’m not religious, but I found my voice in a campus support group run by a chaplain.

I hadn’t played soccer since I was a kid, but I joined an adult recreational league and found that I could live completely in the moment while chasing a ball around a field.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all grieving method. Much of it comes down to flailing around until you find what works. Death is always unexpected; so too are the ways we heal.

5. Gratitude wins.

We always feel that we lost a loved one too soon. My mom gave me twenty good years. Of course I would’ve liked more time, but self-pity and gratitude are flipsides of the same coin; choosing the latter will serve you in positive ways, while the former gives you absolutely nothing.

6. Choose to thrive.

My mom and I share similar temperaments. After her death, I worried I was also destined for an unhappy outcome. This is one of the many tricks that grief plays: it makes you think you don’t deserve happiness.

It’s easier to self-destruct than it is to practice self-care . I initially coped through alcohol and other destructive methods, but I knew this was only clouding my grieving process. I had to face the pain directly, and write my way through it. So I wrote a book.

Everyone has their own constructive coping mechanisms, and choosing those, even when it’s hard, is worth it in the long run. My mother may not have been able to find happiness in her own life, but I know she would want that for me. No one is going to water you like a plant—you have to choose to thrive.

7. Time heals, but on its own timeline.

“Time heals all wounds” is something I heard a lot at my mother’s memorial service. Here’s what I wish I had known: grief time does not operate like normal time. In the first year, the present was obscured entirely by the past. Grieving demanded that I revisit every detail leading up to losing my mom.

As I slowly started to find effective coping mechanisms, I began to feel more rooted in the present. My mood did not have to be determined by the hurts of the past.

There will always be good days and bad. This is the bargain we sign on for as humans. Once we make it through the worst days, we gain a heightened sense of appreciation for the small moments of joy to be found in normal days. Healing comes over time, but only if we’re willing to do the work of grieving.

8. Let your loss highlight your gains.

I’ve lived in New York City for eight years now, but it still shocks me that I’ve built a life that I love here. It’s a gift I attribute to my mom. She was always supportive of my stubborn desire to pursue a career as a writer. After she died, the only thing that made sense to me was to write about the experience.

This led me to grad school in New York, a place I had never even considered living before. It feels like home now. I wish I could share it with my mom, but it was her belief in me that got me here. I lost my mom, but I found a home, good friends, a career I love and the perspective to appreciate it all.

9. Heartbreak is a sign of progress.

In the first years after the big loss, I assumed romance was dead to me. Why would I allow someone else to break my heart? Luckily I got past this fear to the point where I was able to experience a long and loving relationship .

That relationship eventually imploded, but I did not, which strikes me as a sign of progress. Grief makes us better equipped to weather the other life losses that are sure to come. This is not pessimism. This is optimism that the rewards of love always trump its risks.

10. Grief makes us beginners.

Death is the only universal, and grieving makes beginners out of all of us. Yet grief affects us all in different ways. There is no instruction manual on how best to cope.

There is only time, day by day and sometimes minute by minute, to feel what works, and to cast aside what does not. In the ten years I’ve learned to live without my mother, I’ve tried to see my grieving process as an evolutionary one. Loss has enriched my life in challenging, unexpected, and maybe even beautiful ways.

About Lindsay Harrison

Lindsay Harrison is a New York based writer and editor. Her first book, Missing , was published by Simon & Schuster. When she's not writing, she's most likely playing soccer or walking her dog, who looks like a fox.

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How to Cope with the Loss of Your Mother

For many people the loss of their mother is harder than the loss of their father. Not because they loved them any less, but the bond between mother and child is a special one. Your mother gave birth to you. She fed you and nurtured you throughout your childhood. The mother is one who tends to have the most responsibility for the care of the child, and is at home with the children more often than the father in most cases.

Your mother is the one you turn to when you break up with your first boyfriend or girlfriend, when you need advice or when you have a problem. Your mother is not only your greatest advocate, she is part of you. You might even look like her. She might be your best friend as well as your mother. It is like losing a part of yourself.

No-one is ever as interested in everything you do as your mother, or as proud of you.

Grief for your mother is one of the hardest things we face in life

Mothers tend to hold families together. They are the ones who keep in touch with all the family members and spread the news around. They are the ones who arrange get togethers, keep the family home together, and generally are the hub of family life. Once the mother is gone, the family either fragments or you have to step in to her role as the main communicator and organiser.

Even if you didn't have the perfect relationship with your mother, her loss can be just as devastating. You no longer have the chance to put things right, to hear her say I love you, or I'm proud of you.

Although the loss of a parent is a normal part of growing up, and it happens to everyone, it is no less devastating. But many people are surprised at how much it affects them. Their friends and family perhaps won't realise just how big a blow it can be, especially if they were old or ill for a long time and it was expected.

Grief for the death of a mother is one of the hardest things we face in life, but nearly all of us have to face it at some time. Everyone's grief is different, and we all have our own ways of coping. We may feel some or all of the emotions of grief at times, or we might just feel numb and blank.

When I lost my own mother I went into denial.  It was easy to bury what had happened because I was living far away and had two young children to cope with.  Have a read of my story about how I failed to grieve properly here. 

The importance of support after the loss of your mother

If you are lucky enough to have a close family member or friend in whom you can confide, you may be able to grieve without needing any extra help.  Some people, for various reasons, may need some more professional guidance if they get stuck in their grief or don't have any close support network.  

Here are a few of our recommendations for getting help:

Find out if you need grief counseling here

Download a hypnosis session - Death of a Parent

How to find a grief support group

Men and women grieve differently, so be aware of this. Don't be too hard on your partner if he or she is not able to give you all the support you need. It is a difficult time for them too, and not everyone knows what to do, or what to say.

Read my article on Men and Grief for more understanding. 

However you are feeling, know that you are not alone. Talk to friends and family. Join a grief support group , but don't be ashamed that you are grieving. It is a natural and normal process, even if it happens to everyone at some point in their lives.

There are lots more helpful articles on the site to guide you on your pathway through grief.  

Related Pages:  

Books on Grief for Loss of your Mother

A Sudoku Led Recovery - The Loss of my 95 Year Old Mother

Losing the Childhood Home when Mother Died

Healing from the Loss of My Mother

This page is dedicated to Stephanie and Simone who lost their beloved mother in 2012

• Grief and Sympathy Home
• Losing a Parent as an Adult
• Loss of Mother

Where to get help: 

Have you considered one-on-one online grief counseling .

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The following information about online counseling is sponsored by 'Betterhelp' but all the opinions are our own.  To be upfront, we do receive a commission when you sign up with 'Betterhelp', but we have total faith in their expertise and would never recommend something we didn't completely approve.  

Do you feel alone and sad with no support and no idea how to move forward?  It can be tough when you are stuck in grief to find the motivation to get the most out of your precious life. 

Online counseling can help by giving you that support so you don't feel so alone. You can have someone to talk to anytime you like, a kind and understanding person who will help you to find meaning in life again, to treasure the memories of your loved one without being overwhelmed and to enjoy your activities, family and friends again.

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Hypnosis for Grief - 10 Ways It Can Help You

Try a gentle hypnotherapy track to relax the mind. Learn how self-hypnosis can help you cope with grief at any time of the day or night.  

Read more about it here. 

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Check out our lovely range of memorial jewelry for any lost loved one.  Pendants, necklaces, rings or bracelets, we have them all in all kinds of styles.  Choose for yourself or buy as a sympathy gift. 

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How to Deal With the Death of a Mother

Theodora Blanchfield is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and mental health writer using her experiences to help others. She holds a master's degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University and is a board member of Still I Run, a non-profit for runners raising mental health awareness. Theodora has been published on sites including Women's Health, Bustle, Healthline, and more and quoted in sites including the New York Times, Shape, and Marie Claire.

Daniel B. Block, MD, is an award-winning, board-certified psychiatrist who operates a private practice in Pennsylvania.

EMS-FORSTER-PRODUCTIONS / Getty Images

The death of one's mother is one of the hardest things most people will go through in life. Whether you two had a great relationship, a strained relationship, or something in between, this event will likely have a significant impact on your life.

In one survey, between 20% to 30% of participants stated that losing a loved one was the most traumatic event in their lives—even among those who had reported 11 or more traumatic events over the course of their life. For that group, 22% still ranked the loss of a loved one as their most traumatic event.

Why the Death of One's Mother Is So Hard

Whether you are grieving the death of a mother who birthed you or a mother (or mother figure) who raised you, you are either grieving the bond you had or the bond you wish you had.

John Bowlby , a British psychologist, believed that children are born with a drive to seek attachment with their caregivers. While others before him believed that attachment was food-motivated, he believed that attachment formed based on nurturing and responsiveness.

Therefore, it makes sense that grieving that attachment—or lack thereof—would be incredibly difficult.

A mother is such an integral part of our lives in our society, in part because we are not raised in communities with a variety of caretakers,” says Liz Schmitz-Binnall, PsyD, who has done research on mother loss and resilience.

Her research specifically focused on adult women who had lost their mothers as children and found that they scored lower on resilience than those who had not lost mothers as children.

She says she sees many people who didn’t have a good relationship with their mother but are surprised at the strength of their grief reaction following their mother’s death.

How a Mother's Death Can Affect Someone

While mother loss differs from other losses in some key ways, some of the same effects that come from any kind of loss or bereavement are present. Some thoughts and feelings typical of grief:

• Difficulty concentrating

Less known is that grief can show up physically , in addition to the more-known mental or spiritual indications. In your body, grief may look like:

• Digestive problems
• Energy loss
• Nervousness
• Sleep disturbances
• Weight changes 

Risk of Psychiatric Disorders

In others, however, a loss of a loved one may activate mental health disorders even in those with no history of mental illness. One study found an increased risk for the following disorders, in addition to discovering a new link between mania and loss:

• Major depressive disorder
• Panic disorder
• Posttraumatic disorder

Specifically in adults over the age of 70: 

• Manic episodes
• Alcohol use disorders
• Generalized anxiety disorder 

What Is Complex Bereavement?

All grief is complex, but upon losing someone, many people are able to slowly readjust to their daily routines (or create new routines). Mental health professionals may call it complicated or complex bereavement if it has been at least a year and your daily function is still significantly impacted. 

(Note: the current clinical name is Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder, but the American Psychiatric Association recently approved a change of name to Prolonged Grief Disorder. )

Some of the signs of prolonged grief are the following symptoms still significantly impacting your daily functioning after 12 months:

• Difficulty moving on with life 
• Emotional numbness 
• Thoughts that life is meaningless
• A marked sense of disbelief about the death

In one study, 65% of participants with complicated grief had thought about wanting to die themselves after losing a loved one. So if you, or someone you know who is grieving, is having suicidal thoughts, know that you aren’t alone and this is not uncommon for what you are going through.

If you are having suicidal thoughts but feel you can keep yourself safe, you should talk to a mental health professional. If the thoughts become unbearable and you are in imminent danger of hurting yourself, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 for support from a counselor who is trained in this.

How to Heal from the Death of a Mother

When loss is fresh, it feels like you will feel that way forever—but you won’t.

“If you allow yourself to grieve, and if others allow you to grieve,” says Schmitz-Binnall, “you will probably notice that the really intense feelings will lessen during the first few months after the death of your mother.”

She says that while most people intuitively realize it can be hard to lose a mother, they don’t realize quite how hard it can be—or how long it can take. “People in our society often think we can move through grief in a month and be done with it.”

And even if we don’t acknowledge those feelings, that doesn’t mean they aren’t existing and impacting our lives anyway.

Liz Schmitz-Binnall

Too many people push us to ‘get on with life’ too soon after a significant loss. We need to be able to grieve, but...we also need to adjust our expectations of ourselves.

Some of her tips:

• Feel the feelings
• Or let yourself feel nothing
• Talk about your feelings
• Spend time by yourself
• Spend time with others
• Talk to her (in whatever way that means for you and your beliefs—it may also include writing letters to her.)

Talk to a Professional

Therapy can be helpful after a major loss like this. While most therapists will have worked with grief, as it's one of the most universal life experiences, there are also therapists who specialize in working with clients with grief. To find one, search for grief therapist or grief counselor in your area.

Get Help Now

We've tried, tested, and written unbiased reviews of the best online therapy programs including Talkspace, BetterHelp, and ReGain. Find out which option is the best for you.

Find a Community

Since grief can feel like such an isolating experience, many find comfort in support groups, whether they be in-person or an online support group. If you are a woman who has lost a mother, you may be interested in the Motherless Daughters community , which is both virtual and has offline meetups.

A Word From Verywell

The death of a mother is one of the most traumatic things someone can experience. If you are currently grieving your mother, give yourself grace. Whether you had a good relationship or not with her, there will always be grief associated with either the actual relationship you had or the one you wish you had.

Hasin DS, Grant BF. The national epidemiologic survey on alcohol and related conditions (Nesarc) waves 1 and 2: review and summary of findings .  Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol . 2015;50(11):1609-1640. doi:10.1007/s00127-015-1088-0

Schmitz-Binnall E. Resilience in adult women who experienced early mother loss .  All Antioch University Dissertations & Theses .

• Keyes KM, Pratt C, Galea S, McLaughlin KA, Koenen KC, Shear MK. The burden of loss: unexpected death of a loved one and psychiatric disorders across the life course in a national study .  AJP . 2014;171(8):864-871. doi:10.4088/jcp.v67n0209
• Szanto K, Shear MK, Houck PR, et al. Indirect self-destructive behavior and overt suicidality in patients with complicated grief.   J Clin Psychiatry . 2006;67(2):233-239. doi:10.4088/jcp.v67n0209

By Theodora Blanchfield, AMFT Theodora Blanchfield is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and mental health writer using her experiences to help others. She holds a master's degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University and is a board member of Still I Run, a non-profit for runners raising mental health awareness. Theodora has been published on sites including Women's Health, Bustle, Healthline, and more and quoted in sites including the New York Times, Shape, and Marie Claire.

Personal Grief and Loss Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

The complicated nature of life explains why grieving is a necessary process. The loss of a beloved person can trigger numerous emotions such as guilt, anger, disbelief, and sadness. Coping with sudden death can result in a major challenge. It is agreeable that most of these reactions and emotional responses to loss are natural. That being the case, people should help one another throughout the mourning process in order to find new meaning and move on with life. Those who are in emotional pain should also be allowed to cry in order to support the healing process. The death of my favorite aunt affected me significantly. After the event, it took me five days to accept the fact that my aunt was gone. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to give a personal experience of loss, grief, and mourning following my aunt’s untimely demise.

The most memorable loss occurred when I was 21 years of age. This was after the death of my maternal aunt. She was only 10 years older. Her untimely death occurred when I was in the United States. Our age gap explains why we used to be close to one another. We could do many things together and support each other. She was shot four times while in Colombia and died instantly.

Although it was hard to explain the circumstances that led to her death, forensic investigations revealed that she had been murdered by robbers for an unknown reason. The victim was a mother-figure to me. As an aunt, she guided, empowered, and encouraged me to pursue most of my dreams. This analysis shows that I was emotionally close to her.

After the loss, I experienced numerous emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenges. Such feelings occurred for several weeks after my aunt’s death. Several reasons can be presented to support this argument. The first one is that I was unable to pursue my goals. This development made it hard for me to meet the needs of my underage daughter. The second example is that I become stressed and troubled. This emotional response occurred after I received the news of her death. The third example is that I was unable to interact with other people. This means that my social competencies were affected greatly. After the death, it took me five days to accept the fact that she was gone. Throughout this period, I could dial her cell-phone number to confirm that she was not with us anymore. This was the case because I felt stressed and discontented with everything in life. The pain in my body was also unbearable.

I was unable to focus on my spiritual goals and mental status. However, I managed to cope with the loss after several months due to the support received from different family members. For instance, my husband was helpful throughout this troubling period. It should also be observed that my failure to attend her funeral might have affected my healing process. This is the reason why individuals who have lost their beloved ones should be advised, guided, and supported accordingly.

My mourning process affected the people around me in a number of ways. For instance, I was not able to support or raise up my young daughter. I was also unable to interact freely with my husband and relatives. I also found it hard to interact with my colleagues, relatives, and friends. The good news was that most of my family members were helpful during this emotional period. This was the case because they empowered me to deal with my grief and be in a position to pursue my aims. They were also keen to console and encourage me to remain strong. It is also worth noting that none of the persons around me was hurtful during the time.

The major rituals considered during the time of loss were prayers and fasting. These practices are known to support the mourning process (Burke & Neimeyer, 2014). I also began to smoke as a way of getting rid of stress. I used different links to feel connected to the deceased person. For instance, my grandmother managed to send my aunt’s graduation ring to me. I always wear the ring as a grim reminder of my beloved aunt. I also possess the clothes she was wearing at the time of the murder. I have never washed them and they are bloodstains.

Holdsworth (2015) asserts that human beings use various techniques to manage their lamentation processes. The first technique that can be used to describe my mourning process is that of writing (Eyetsemitan, 2017). It is evident that my aunt had written a letter to me. Due to the nature of her death, I had not responded to her letter. This is something that has been haunting me over the years. I also have many things in my heart that I was never given the opportunity to say to my aunt. For instance, I did not tell her how she was loved and missed. I have many photographs that remind me of our experiences together.

I strongly believed that a number of rituals can still help with the loss today. For instance, I would be happy to be given a chance to visit her grave. I would mourn and pray on her grave in order to complete my mourning process. Personally, I think that the intensity of my loss could not be sensationalized by the media. This is the reason why I decided to engage in smoking. These aspects show conclusively that my mourning process was complicated (Burke & Neimeyer, 2014). This argument can be supported by the fact that it is several years after the loss and I am yet to heal completely. I also experienced intense rumination, pain, and sorrow during the period. The decision to hold on to her belongings also explains why the process was complicated.

It is agreeable that this loss occurred at a time when I was not aware of the nature of suffering (Hordan & Litz, 2014). With more knowledge, I would have kept myself busy, interacted with more people, and read different materials to support the mourning process. I would have also attended her funeral in order to stop feeling guilty.

There are various complicated mourning issues that have kept me stuck in my mourning process. The first one is that it has taken me many years to be in a position to talk about my aunt. It has been hard for me to accept the fact that she is no longer around us. The second issue is that minor events or memories can trigger intense or painful reactions (Worden, 2008). Sometimes I can start to cry after remembering her.

This course has made it easier for me to learn a number of things about myself. The first observation is that the loss of a close relative or friend can affect me negatively. Such an occurrence can make it hard for me to achieve my goals or interact with others. The second lesson is that I can address most of my emotional and psychological challenges. This is the case because I managed to deal with this loss successfully. It is also clear that I have gained numerous ideas and concepts about mourning from this course. For instance, I have known that individuals should be guided and empowered throughout the period (Eyetsemitan, 2017). People should also be allowed to cry and mourn throughout their lamentation periods.

My discussion shows clearly that my aunt was like a sister to me and a big confidant who supported everything I was doing. This means that she was always close to me. Since she was young, we used to share ideas and live like sisters. Despite these feelings of pain and anguish, it should be observed that the mourning process empowered me to develop better concepts that can be used to support others. The ideas gained from this course can also meet the needs of persons who have lost their friends or relatives. My experience after the loss of my aunt echoes most of the challenges faced by many mourning persons. It is, therefore, necessary for those who are in grief to keep themselves busy and interact with others to prevent any suicidal thoughts. Mourners should also never be avoided. Consequently, these lessons will empower me to guide others in the future.

Burke, L. A., & Neimeyer, R. A. (2014). Spiritual distress in bereavement: Evolution of a research program. Religions, 5, 1087-1115. Web.

Eyetsemitan, F. (2017). Employee grief, workplace culture, and implications for worker productivity and psychopathology. Acta Psychopathologica, 3 (4), 1-3. Web.

Holdsworth, M. (2015). Bereaved carers’ accounts of the end of life and the role of care providers in a ‘good death’: A qualitative study. Palliative Medicine, 29 (9), 834-841.

Hordan, A. H., & Litz, B. T. (2014). Prolonged grief disorder: Diagnostic, assessment, and treatment considerations. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 45 (3), 180-187. Web.

Worden, J. W. (2008). Grief counseling and grief therapy: A handbook for the mental health practitioner (4th ed.). New York, NY: Springer Publishing.

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Death of a Parent , Grief , Motherhood

A Letter To My Mother in Heaven

• 7  Minute Read

I miss you. I wish you were here. I can tell you a mom is irreplaceable for a child. When a mom dies, her child is no longer whole. The loss makes it hard to breathe. That child flails in the wind like a cottonwood seed. A piece of fluff that gets knocked about the world by the wind. Sometimes I landed on solid ground, sometimes I landed in a pond and almost drowned. But I’m still here.

I survived.

RELATED: To Those Who Know the Bitter Hurt of Losing a Parent

In the year after your death, my dreams plagued me whether they were about your death or when they fooled me into thinking you were still alive. Waking up in sorrow and again remembering you were dead was the hardest point of each day.

Know that you are missed more than words could ever say, Mom .

I’ve felt your absence every day of my life since you were stolen from me. I fell into a never-ending well of agony after you died. I dwelled there for years. Depression ran in my veins alongside my blood. The blood became rough and scraped up my heart.

I went haywire as a teenager. Depression left me crawling through my days. I tell you this, Mom, not to make you sad but to let you know how much of an impact losing you had on my young life. I did many things I shouldn’t have. I gave up many things you had loved right alongside me, but somehow with you gone they just didn’t matter anymore. The joy of them was stripped from me. I became empty.

I searched for many things to fill myself up. Many were bad things, but some were good. I had good friends who helped and distracted me. I had the rest of my family too who gave me love. I had pets and cats to console me and give me company. Pets you had loved too. The cats looked for you, I saw them searching, but they could never find you. I understood their sadness and confusion.

I could never forget you. A part of me is still lost and I’m wondering if I will ever get it back. Maybe that piece is in your heavenly home with you and someday you can put it back in me and I will be whole again.

RELATED: Did My Mom Know How Much I Loved Her?

One day not long after you died I found a card cradled in the grass of our backyard. The card had a picture of Jesus on the front. It looked like an old card. I wondered who put it there. Did it fall from heaven and you dropped it for me to find? Had someone put it in a balloon from far away and that balloon popped over my house leaving the card to fall? Did God put it there? Did a neighbor nestle it into our grass to give me comfort? I still have the card. The words on the card were Psalm 23. It was about comfort and the valley of death. I had to wonder if it was a sign from you that you were in heaven. It made me cry hard. Sharply splintered tears had ripped streaks from my eyes down to my toes leaving me memories of that moment as scars of grief.

We used to light a candle for you at Christmas. You died right before Christmas so I guess this made sense. We don’t do it anymore and I’m not sure why because I still miss you. I guess I’m busy with my own boys and our own Christmas family traditions. I want to light a candle for you at Christmas again.

RELATED: What it’s Like to Love a Motherless Daughter

I cried so many tears I lost myself as that young teen girl. When I looked I couldn’t find myself so I wrote down my agony. The loss of you brought me to writing. It was my counselor, my friend, and my dumping pad. I had to get it all out and writing it down was the only way that worked. When I talked to others about my emptiness they just didn’t get it. They hadn’t gone through what I had gone through. They would judge me even if they didn’t mean to. I could always see it in their eyes. They either felt bad for me and their eyes welled up with pity or they just didn’t know what to say. They were so consumed by the pity that no real help came forth. I don’t even know what would have helped. Probably nothing.

My world fell apart when you died.

The whole world shifted while I made peanut brittle in chemistry class the morning you died. I remember how the peanut brittle shards looked in the tin foil. The classroom lights reflecting brightly off the tin foil. The peanut brittle stack on the black square high top table. The table they called me down to the office from to tell me of your death.

I miss the foods you made. No one can make food the way you made it, Mom. You gave food to me with love and your smile. It can’t be replicated. It’s impossible, no one else has your smile . Sometimes I think of you now when I give my boys plates of food. I focus on that because sometimes I’m busy and it’s hard to get them their food, but I want them to remember me serving them with love and a smile. When I remember this perspective, I feel good. I feel like a mom. I feel more like you.

I learned how to be a mom from you. You were a fantastic mom. I know not everyone can say that about their mothers. I was lucky to have you. Mom, you were fantastic, awesome, loving, creative, giving, and kind. Now that I am an adult I understand how great you were. I learned to give to others and be generous by watching you.

RELATED: To my Mom, I Get it Now

The loss of you made me strong. I became an independent young woman who wanted to do it all on her own. I love that I became strong, but I hate that I had to lose you to do it. I hope and pray my children become strong. I hope and pray they don’t have to lose me to become that way. I will mold them. Give them tasks to make them strong. I don’t want to leave them to strengthen them. There must be another way. I will find it.

I often pray that you are able to know some of my joys.

I hope you can know some small piece of my life. I wish you could have met my husband and I wish you could have felt in your heart the excitement I had on my wedding day. You missed it all, but I’m hoping someday I will see you and you will tell me you were there with me. You will tell me you sat in the church and watched me marry my husband. I hope you will tell me you were able to see my sons’ faces when they burst into this world. Oh, how I could have used your help and wisdom. How we could have shared laughter and snuggles together with my babies.

RELATED: A Love Letter From Mamas in Heaven to Their Beautiful Daughters on Earth

They are all getting big now. I hope you can see how tall they are getting. They fight a lot but they also play well together. The times they play are sweet jewels in my day. When they make me smile out of pure joy, I know what being a mom is all about. I am a lucky woman, Mom. I had you and now I get to be a mom, and I treasure that.

Thank you, Mom. I love you.

With love, Your daughter

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Julie Hoag is a freelance writer and blogger, wife, and mom to three busy boys, & fur mama to two rescue dogs and two guinea pigs. She writes on her blog about motherhood, kids, family, recipes, DIY, travel, and faith. She is a vegetarian who loves to cook and create recipes when she’s not driving her three boys all over town to sports practices in her crumb-filled minivan. In her past life she has worked as a Scientist and Medical Data Manager, a pediatric nurse, and a SAHM. She loves to volunteer in her kids’ schools and help fundraise money for their schools. She is a Christian who loves nature, animals, traveling, gardening, swimming in her pool, and simply spending time with her family. Her favorites are dark chocolate, red wine, and cheese with yummy bread. http://www.juliehoagwriter.com/

A Mother’s Love Never Dies, Even When She Does

The day your mom dies, when you become motherless, you will start wondering and questioning things you never imagined you would. Things you couldn’t even think about before she died and probably never would have until after you lost her. You’ll wonder where she is a million times a day from the very second she leaves and all the minutes after she’s gone. You’ll wonder if she’s somewhere nearby or really far away because sometimes you can feel it both ways. One minute, you have to catch your breath because you feel her so near it’s as if you could...

A How-To Guide To Life For the Motherless Daughter

I don’t have appropriate words to describe my mother. It wasn’t that she was determined because that implies an overall plan of action. She just kept going. I wouldn’t call it perseverance because that invokes the idea that eventually she prevailed. She didn’t. She just kept going. She was not quite persistent or tenacious, and certainly not resolute or steadfast. She woke up every day and did what had to be done all day long, no matter how difficult or unfair or unpleasant. She was not energetic or particularly positive or even hopeful. She just kept going . . ....

5 Things That Happen When Your Mom Dies

It seems as though I’m in good company in the Motherless Daughters Club these days. While it’s hard to watch friends lose their moms (and dads) much too young, I know from my own experience that, eventually, they will come out the other side, stronger and wiser, even though that ache never really goes away. Here are five things you will probably experience after your mom dies. 1. You become your own biggest cheerleader. When your mom is gone, you become your own biggest fan by proxy. No one will ever care about your accomplishments and your dreams and your...

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Lessons from My Mother

By James Wood

At my mother’s funeral, I was calmer than I had ever imagined being. She was eighty-seven and had lived a long and fruitful life, and for some time her body had been signalling its eagerness to depart: almost blind from macular degeneration, emaciated, she had been bedridden for months, after a bad fall. She died alone, but my father and I were at her side a few hours before her death. In the hospital room, grief conspired with natural curiosity: so this is how a body near death functions; this is how most of us will go. . . . Six or seven seconds passed between deep breaths; each was likely to be the last, and the renewal of breath, when it came, seemed almost like a strange, teasing physiological game—no, not yet, not quite. In the days before she died, a sentence from “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” kept coming to my mind. Peter Ivanovich is looking at Ivan Ilyich’s corpse: “The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.” Those words sustained me. A long life, a fulfilling career as a schoolteacher, a merciful end (relatively speaking), three children and a devoted husband: what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.

And there was another “right” thing, which would have satisfied Tolstoy in his late religious phase. My mother died a Christian, sure that she was going to meet her Redeemer. I don’t share that belief, but in those last months I was sometimes consoled by the thought of my parents’ consolation. My mother had chosen all the readings and the hymns for her funeral, and I admired the optimism that filled the church. We ended the service with an old Methodist rabble-rouser, “Thine Be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son,” sung to a tune from Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.” It was hard not to be moved when the minister said that my mother was finally at one with the Lord she had spent a lifetime serving: she was now in the glory of his presence. Could these words, beautifully improbable, possess the power entrusted to them? For a moment, it seemed as if the ugly oak coffin, sitting on trestles near the altar, were less a final box than the husk of another husk, the body now joyously unimportant, finally discarded. The ancient promise: the soul has thrown off its impediments and is flying away.

There was a moment when I came close to tears, and it involved another set of words. I feared discomposure, didn’t want to be an embarrassment (that shaming English shame). But it was not so easy when the minister read this prayer: “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” It’s a beautiful plea—“a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” But the phrase I found most moving was “and our work is done.” Like most mothers, mine worked very hard: the never finished labor of maternity. In many ways, she was an almost stereotypically Scottish mother (the goyish version of the Jewish caricature)—passionate, narrow, judgmental, always aspiring. Her children were her artifacts, through which she created the drama of her own restless ambitions. These ambitions were moral and social. She wanted us to be morally successful, to get the best possible grades from the Great Examiner. It was my mother who told me that my untidy bedroom was unworthy of good Christian living (it showed “poor stewardship”), that I should speak not of “luck” but of “blessing,” and who was made distinctly nervous by my talk of having a beer in a pub (“only ever half a pint, I hope”; her own Scottish mother had signed the “temperance pledge,” and never drank). The emphasis, in Protestant fashion, was rigorous and corrective. There was plenty of happiness in our household, but it was rarely religious happiness. The self was viewed with suspicion, as if it were a mob of appetites and hedonism. As an adolescent, I was often told that “ self , self , self is all you think about,” and that “selfishness is your whole philosophy.” Life was understood to be constant moral work, a job that could never really be “done,” because the ideal was Jesus’ unsurpassable perfection. My mother and I quarrelled over the corpse of my religious faith. She told me that at night she prayed I would “come back into the fold.” As a young man, I lined up my pagan, life-loving heroes—Nietzsche, Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Keith Moon, Ian Dury—in glorious defensive formation: reasons to be cheerful.

Her social aspirations weren’t always compatible with her religious aspirations, though they proceeded from the same extraordinary will. The woman who wanted to assign luck to godly providence also believed deeply in the earned fortune of hard work. She understood, again in familiar Scottish fashion, that social advancement was best achieved through education. Her own origins were lower middle class, petit bourgeois: she had an uncle who was a doctor—the star of the family—but neither of her parents had gone to university. Her mother had a Scottish accent; hers came and went. She told me that she had been bullied at her fairly ordinary state school for affecting, like Margaret Thatcher, a “posh” accent a few stations above her class; it was always difficult for me to assess Mrs. Thatcher with any neutrality, because in demeanor and sheer force of will she so reminded me of my mother.

Teaching ran in my family. My father was also a teacher, and my mother’s grandfather was in charge of a small junior school, long gone, in a house situated in gentle fields outside Edinburgh. Mother remembered visiting him during the summer holidays, when, so she told me, he would coach private pupils, boys headed for expensive boarding schools in Scotland and England. Over the years, a few of these boys, suitably crammed with exam-busting power, went to Eton, and it was this knowledge that gave my mother the idea that if she had sons she would “send them to Eton.”

An absurd story, in part because women of my mother’s class were not exactly invited to think of Eton as within their reach. They had not enough money, and certainly not enough social standing. But I believe what she told me, because it sounds so magnificently like her, and because she achieved her ambition. It was financial insanity, even with the help of scholarships and bursaries, to try to send two sons to Eton and a daughter to a boarding school in Scotland, and it brought my parents to the verge of ruin. (I will never forget the moment when my father phoned me to ask if he could borrow five hundred pounds. He was sixty-two, and perilously close to being broke; I was twenty-five, had just started working for a London newspaper, and had my first regular salary.)

Eton was also unnecessary: there was a good grammar school not far from our town, a place that sent kids every year to Oxford and Cambridge. But who is defining necessity? I guess that my mother considered the unnecessary surplus of private education—the invisible social lift that a place like Eton offered—absolutely necessary. If not, why else put her family through the hardship and labor? And mostly that’s what it was. Not for me, the lucky beneficiary of my mother’s quixotic and self-abnegating striving, but for my perpetually impoverished parents. My father, a zoologist, had no more money than his modest salary from an English university; Mother taught at the local girls’ school. They needed every penny. Had they sat down, at the start of it all, and run the numbers on the back of an envelope, they would never have contemplated private education for their three children. But they believed in sacrifice, and they probably imagined that they could muddle through somehow, borne aloft by my mother’s surging triumphalism. And by extra work: in addition to his teaching, my father marked Open University and high-school exam papers in the summer vacation. And my mother, in addition to her weekday school teaching, took on a Saturday job, at a bookshop in town. There cannot be many old Etonians, in the entire history of that fabled and fortunate place, whose mothers, daunted by debt, worked a Saturday job, standing behind a cash register. When I was young, I wasn’t proud enough of her; indeed, I was probably a bit ashamed.

Yet that tremendous force of character was riddled with anxiety and doubt. Her anxiety was structurally related to her ambition; her vigilance resembled the omniscient uncertainty of immigrant parents. (The story of social class in Britain is, figuratively, one of emigration and immigration: a voyaging out of one station or place and into another. At Eton, I was a spy from the obscure North of England and the equally obscure middle classes, quickly learning the language and the signification of the surprisingly hospitable enemy.) My mother fiercely desired her children’s success, but never quite believed in it. We were like the parishioners who Jonathan Edwards warned were suspended over Hell by “a slender thread,” which an angry God might sever at any minute. Was this a theological fear that became a social one, or the other way around? Certainly, the two anxieties were inextricable: look away from the struggle, for one second, and you may fall. In our household, there could be no complacency. Mother didn’t assume I would go to Cambridge or Oxford; she didn’t assume I would get to university at all, despite indications to the contrary. If you get to university—that was the menacing conditional. Exams were sites of strenuous terror, doors that opened onto everything desirable but that could as easily be closed in one’s face.

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For the same reason, she only warily encouraged my desire to be a writer. I might just be able to pull it off, but only if I worked at it, with devotion and Protestant modesty. The profession of letters was generally admirable, but the idea of my being a writer made her anxious: How would I earn a living? What sort of social status could I ever achieve? Was writing, at bottom, even a moral activity? I tried to make my case, aware of how flimsy and amoral my ambitions sounded. Her idol was the writer and politician John Buchan, the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister who rose from that relatively humble background to the heights of Oxford, later becoming a Member of Parliament and the governor-general of Canada: a man of substance. I didn’t take him very seriously as a writer; as I saw it, Buchan’s worldly success richly compensated for—and effectively obliterated—the eccentricity of his wanting to be a writer in the first place. But I understood why his example meant so much to my mother, and why she used it to push me on. John Buchan, she would intone, rose at five in the morning to write his books (not least “The Thirty-nine Steps”), before going out into the world and earning a living: “You will have to work like that if you want to achieve anything comparable.” She preferred the security of the law, or medicine (the path my brother took), or the academy (a shabby but dependable cousin to these grander professions). Her expressed hope was that when she answered the phone and a stranger asked to speak to Dr. Wood she could reply, “Which one? My husband, or one of my three children? We have four Dr. Woods in this house.” (She ended up with only two, her husband and my brother.)

In many ways, she was a natural teacher. She marched her children around English stately homes and told us the history of these places, in loud, confident tones; we sometimes feared that she might be mistaken for a docent. She took us to many museums, and to the great sites of Scottish history—Culloden, Glenfinnan, Glencoe. She certainly encouraged us; more often she goaded, enforced. But she also defended us. When my first-grade teacher reported that I could read “fluently enough, but without much comprehension,” she took it up with the school. Years later, when I got a B in an English exam (it was my best subject, so I was “supposed” to get an A), she made me sit for the exam again, the unspoken but hovering implication being that I would keep retaking it until the expected grade was achieved. My father, in his usual mild manner, went along with all these incursions and improvements.

It was a joke in our family that my mother and Muriel Spark’s great fictional creation, Miss Jean Brodie, shared a certain temperament, as well as a profession that was really a vocation. Like Miss Brodie (or like Maggie Smith’s impersonation, in the 1969 movie), my mother had a genteel Anglo-Scots accent, taught at a private girls’ school, was forceful and opinionated, had firm ideas about education, and was clearly a wonderful presence in the classroom, filling the girls’ heads with strange stories, historical gossip, unusual dates, nice prejudices, delicious facts. I know that she loved talking to her classes about her own children; over the years, I would encounter some of her former pupils, and was amused by how much these young women knew about our family life. (They invariably knew that I played the trumpet, and had been to Eton.) When my mother used John Buchan’s work ethic as a moral goad, it was hard not to hear Miss Brodie telling her girls that she was going to learn Greek: “John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

In Spark’s novel, we never see Miss Brodie not performing, we never see her just at home, offstage, not being a teacher. If she was anything like my mother, that may be an authorial mercy. Though authoritative with her young pupils and with her own children, my mother was not a confident or worldly woman. The anticipation of teaching made her extremely nervous, physically sick at times. The days just before the beginning of term, after the blessing of the holidays, were always tense and furious, full of melancholy and complaint. If she was a natural teacher, she was never an easy one. One of my fondest childhood memories is of standing outside the bathroom door and listening to her on the other side, as she methodically whispered words and dates: she had a history textbook with her in the bathroom, and was cramming for class. If I had been asked, when I was a child, how my mother liked teaching, I would have replied that she hated it. And because of this knowledge my siblings and I were sometimes condescending toward my mother’s work. Today, I would probably say that she disliked it but was powerfully, helplessly drawn to it. Now that I am myself a parent, I realize how perpetually exhausted and overloaded she must have been, how every muscle and nerve must have been pulled taut: three children, a week’s work at school, an extra job on Saturdays, the constant drag of debt. And Sunday, alas, was not a day of rest, but more work—what seemed like endless churchgoing.

A few months after the funeral, I got an e-mail from one of her former students, Katrina Porteous. I knew her name, because she is a poet, who has written eloquently about the North of England, in particular about the Northumberland coast, where she lives. She was one of my mother’s great success stories—Durham High School for Girls, a brilliant history degree at Cambridge University, a Harkness Fellowship to Berkeley and Harvard, and several acclaimed books of verse since the publication of her first collection, “The Lost Music,” in 1996. Mother had spoken of Katrina, and, a year before she died, had given me one of her books. But she was five years older than me, and we hadn’t known each other. We had learned of each other’s movements, literary and otherwise, intermittently and remotely, through my mother.

Katrina had not been in touch with my parents for a long time, and was writing to ask if my mother was in good health, “and whether it might be possible to contact her.” She went on, “I’d like to thank her for the encouragement and inspiration she gave me. She really was the most wonderful teacher. I’ve recently published a new poetry collection with Bloodaxe, and would love to send it to her. Would that be possible?”

It was strange to receive this message, so soon after my mother’s funeral, as if Katrina had some eerie premonition that all was not well, as if the long silence were speaking to her, laden with significance. It was strange, too, to be communicating as two middle-aged people. In my mind, my mother’s “old girls” were still girls, as I was still my mother’s boy. What linked us was lost in our far-off childhoods; and here we were, two graying adults talking across a waste of gain and loss. I wrote to her on Christmas Day, and told her that my mother had died in July. I added that I had been moved by the tributes my father had received from former Durham High School girls. Her e-mail, I told her, was one of the most moving: because she was a writer, and because of the accident of its timing.

Katrina replied four days later. She said she was especially touched to hear from me at Christmas, when she was at home with her own parents, now in their eighties, “in the house from which I travelled to Durham High School every day as a child. One is powerfully transported back to earlier times in those moments.” She continued, “Your mother was and will always remain a profound influence in my life. She gave me the confidence to believe in myself as a ‘writer’ at a precocious age, when I had no right to think of myself as such, but every opportunity to become one. (I am still trying.) Growing up in Consett, the only child of a scientist and a lovely but utterly unbookish mother, I encountered in yours the first ‘woman of letters’ I had met. She was also kind, sensitive, principled and spirited. I adored her. I am so sorry not to have taken the opportunity when I had it to tell her how much her example has meant to me.”

Had Katrina spoken this at my mother’s funeral, I would not have stayed so calm. She, as a pupil, said what I, as a son, could not. Her words were simple and forthright and grateful, while mine would have been complicated and wary and not grateful enough. Did I want to take Katrina’s words as my own? Was I jealous of the easy literary encouragement she received? Perhaps, though surely what made her tribute so moving was precisely that it came from someone else. All sons adore their complicated mothers, in one way or another. But how powerful to encounter, from someone else, the beautifully uncomplicated statement “I adored her.” And Katrina’s message was a revelation, as if one of Miss Brodie’s girls had materialized, in order to write a letter to me. I had a sense that my mother was a good teacher, but I had no idea that she had been such an influential one, and in the very area I had chosen, and struggled to succeed in, often in the face of parental doubts. She had been not just a good teacher but a crucial literary encourager, and I had not been able to see this well enough—because as a mother her pedagogy was so fraught, so anxious and vicarious, and was such a difficult companion of her role as a parent.

Sometimes, in anger or rebellion, I had felt that it was at best a frustration and at worst a misfortune to be the son of such a possessive and sharply gifted teacher. But my father knew better. To my surprise, he had these words put on her gravestone: “A devoted mother and grandmother and dear friend of many, including her former pupils.” He had properly assessed the components of her identity, the parts of her great labor, the variety of her lifework. What was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly. Her work was done. ♦

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

death of mother essay?

<p>Hi, so pretty much my mom died two weeks before my junior year of high school last year. Her case is a bit unique because her doctors at Stanford actually told her she had a week to live right before my sophomore year, and then she lived for a year after that. Everyone I know is telling me that I should write my essay about it, but I have seen a lot of other sources that say not to write about a tragedy, or family death, because it is over done, cliched, etc. I really want my essay to kind of stick out, and not be too sad. Anyone help or advice would be hugely appreciated. </p>

<p>Difficult topics (depression, family death, and general tragedy) are just that: difficult. It’s so easy to end up with an essay that shows simply what you went through and not what you gained from it. I’d tread lightly if you write with that topic. </p>

<p>I think your instincts are right. If your grades slipped or you didn’t have time for ECs due to your mom’s illness and death, you should ask your guidance counselor to mention it in their recommendation. </p>

<p>Even if your grades didn’t slip, I would still write about it to show your strenght and determination to finish high school with high stats. </p>

<p>I am sorry for your lost.</p>

<p>Stories about dying family members can easily turn into “woe-is-me” narratives that the admissions can see through if you don’t convey your message well enough.</p>

<p>If you do decide to write about it, focus less on the death (maybe even not directly mention that she dies at all) and more of what you did with her, personal realization, etc. </p>

<p>Good luck</p>

<p>When I was in high school, my English teacher showed us some sample essays that she thought were well-done, and one of them was about the death of the writer’s father. Of course, just because an English teacher liked it doesn’t necessarily mean it was good, but it’s another data point, for what it’s worth.</p>

<p>I’ve edited application essays professionally, and two people wrote about the death of a parent. My stance on the matter is that the topic is not off-limits, you just have to write about it in a useful way and not fall into common pitfalls, which are pretty much the same common pitfalls for everyone regardless of topic. </p>

<p>For example, both of the aforementioned students’ early drafts said things like, “I was very sad when my father died. I missed him so much” and “The thought that I would never see my mother again was very heartbreaking.” To put it bluntly: Well, DUH. Did you think we thought you weren’t sad that your parent died? We already know that losing a parent is sad and heartbreaking, so tell us things we <em>don’t</em> already know or wouldn’t readily guess. Tell us how it changed you as a person in the long term. Show us that you are, perhaps, more mature or more responsible or more equipped to deal with other hardships or exist in the world in a different way because of your experiences. This is a profoundly life-changing event and you have every right to write about it in your essay (in fact, I bet this is one of the situations they had in mind when they wrote Common App prompt #1 , “story so central to their identity” etc.). Just don’t spend your precious word count on stuff like “I was sad that my mother died”; it’s like saying, “The sky is blue” or “I have one head.” We wouldn’t expect anything else to be the case.</p>

<p>^Lol "I have one head’ made me laugh so hard.</p>

<p>But I so agree with the above poster</p>

<p>OP, I am writing about the same topic. My best advice is to not make it a sob story essay. No one wants to read those and trying to make the adcoms feel sorry for you will not work. The best thing to do is briefly mention it (maybe a paragraph of writing) and then describe how you changed because of it. Avoid clichés at all costs! And try and tell a unique story, something no one else can tell. Best of luck!</p>

Whats your Grief

Reflections on 'Mother'

General / General : Eleanor Haley

For further articles on these topics:

Mother's Day has passed and I suppose many of you were happy to see it go.  For those without a mother and mothers whose children have died, Mother's Day can be filled with feelings of sadness and isolation.  Although I do hope the day was nice for some of you because as Lisa-Jo Baker, one of the lovely authors I'm about to discuss, said "...you can be sad and you can be well at the same time."  

We talked a lot about Mother's Day leading up to the day, in fact some of you may be thinking,  "Yeah yeah we get it you miss your mom",  but sorry we're going to take one last opportunity to muse on 'Mom'.  It's not our fault, there were just so many interesting and thoughtful perspectives on the topic this year that we would hate not to highlight some of our favorites.  Personally I wasn't in the right headspace leading up to Mother's Day to digest these articles (etc) and I feel grateful for the few reflective hours I've spent this morning taking them all in.  As a sidebar, I've started using the word 'headspace' a lot and I'm not sure why or if it even makes sense.

Our regular readers will know we wrote our own post about Mother's Day,   Mother's Day Grief: Life Without a Mother's Love ,  which was a personal reflection on motherly love and what it's like to yearn for it while also being the source of it.

Letters to Mom

Litsa and I are quick to recommend journaling and letter writing to individuals grieving the loss of a loved one, but when we mention this activity in workshops or elsewhere I always get the sense that no one's buying it.  I always think to myself, if they could see what we mean or if they would just try it I think they would understand.  So when Litsa forwarded me Lisa-Jo Bakers recent post, A Letter to My Mother,     I thought " Yes!  This is exactly it."   Baker's letter to her deceased mother is a moving example of continuing bonds with your loved one by writing to them. Obviously she can't really send the letter, but there is power in continuing to talk to her mother just the same.

Her letter is also a beautiful illustration of the motherly-love life cycle.  Her love for her own children is clearly illuminated by the love of her own mother who died when Baker was a young woman.  It seems she understands her mother with greater clarity now that she is a mother herself and reflects that her relationship for her daughter is "...teaching me how you loved me. That you loved me much deeper and longer than I could possibly remember" .

Letters from Mom

Dear Kids,  written by John Dickerson ,  tells parents to write letters to their children now for them to receive when they're older.   Why? For a number of reasons but chief among them is the assertion that child-parent conversations are "out of phase".  In other words, children won't always know how to connect with the underpinnings of their words, thoughts, and actions because they are looking at life through a different lens. It isn't until a child is a bit older and their life phase aligns with the phase the advice was meant for, that you one can start to understand.  I'm doing a horrible job explaining this, but darn it I'm going to keep trying.

For example, it is difficult to conceptualize the depth of your parents love for you until you are a parent yourself.  The vulnerability, fear, passion, and occasional desperation of being a parent are things you can't understand until you've experienced them.  The same goes for advice pertaining to things like marriage, career, kindness, patience and so on; it's not until you have experience with these things that you can reflect on the words of your parents and put them into context.   Often it's not until life has filled in a few blanks that we can look upon their thoughts as sage as opposed to trite.

I will always be your mother

"I will always love you.  And I will always be your mother"  are the words Dr. Claire McCarthy  says every time she visit's her son's grave.  She discusses what these words have come to mean to her in her Huffington Post article  Being the Mother of a Child Who Died--On Mother's Day .  

One of our readers pointed out that we haven't done a good enough job supporting mothers grieving the death of a child on Mother's Day and I think she was right.  Our site talks a lot about grieving the death of a mother because this is the very specific pain I know best, but her comment and McCarthy's post helped me realize what a disservice this is.  I promise you, we'll be on it next year.

McCarthy paints a heartbreaking picture of what it's like to face the assault of Mother's Day hoopla when your child is gone forever.  I can only imagine how lonely and alienating these holiday's might feel for grieving mothers (and fathers).  The fact that this is the only Mother's Day post of it's kind tells me this is a pain grieving mothers are taking on all on their own so I am grateful for McCarthy's brave illustration of what this day is like for her.

Love and Stuff

I could possibly have written an entire post on the article/Op-Doc Love and Stuff   by Judith Helfand .   I rather regret I didn't.  In case the entire beginning of this post didn't tip you off, I'm terrible at summarizing other peoples work and it is virtually impossible for me to convey to you why Love and Stuff is so wonderful.  Well actually, I guess I know why it's wonderful - because of Helfand's unique, humorous, and real perspective.

Anyone who's ever sorted through a loved one's belongings after their death knows that sentimentality's child is absurdity.  Not everyone, but many of us keep things that make no earthly sense.  Helfand beautifully illustrates this in her remarks on a toothbrush, nail clippers, and lip stick as all objects for the  "...toss pile filed under icky, spooky, gross and used [but] to my mind they still held traces of mom's DNA and it was precisely the momishness of them that made it impossible for me to throw them away".   

Things that would have been so easy to discard or find a home for, if going through them with her mother, all ended up in 53 boxes piled in her New York City apartment.  Helfand urges us all to go through our loved one's 'stuff' with them while they're still alive.  Her own mother had asked for Helfand's help with sorting through her belongings on several occasions, but Helfand put it off thinking somehow her mother would live longer if they continued to leave her belongings in their rightful places.  But the author sees this as a missed opportunity to bond with her mother over photographs and old letters, memories triggered by family artifacts, and shared moments.

I really recommend heading over to the New York Times article and taking 10 minutes to watch the included Op-Doc.

Alright friends, this is all I have for you today.  Come back on Monday or just subscribe to receive our posts straight to your email in-box.

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6 comments on "reflections on 'mother'".

Mary   April 13, 2018 at 1:40 pm Reply

I know of one who went through an unwanted (by her) divorce following the revelation of an affair. At the same time they were attenpting fertility treatment. Fortunately or unfortunately, she did not become pregnant. For one who had always wanted children, Morher’s Day, every year, is one of the hardest days for her and a very real grief she feels throughout the year. She has three god-daughters but it is not the same. This is long comment but please address this kind of grief.

Anne Marie Higgins   May 17, 2014 at 7:02 pm Reply

Thank you Eleanor…how do I send you my article?

Anne Marie Higgins   May 16, 2014 at 5:56 pm Reply

I also would like to mention how hard Mother’s Day is for any woman whose has lost her much wanted baby through miscarriage or failed IVF treatments. I had to give up my life long dream after 10 years of infertility treatments and 7 lost babies. Unfortunately, my grief remains “silent” and unrecognized because I was never truly considered pregnant, the babies did not implant but they were alive when they were transferred into my uterus and that made me a mother as far as I was concerned. I think it should be a definite topic to be included when you write again next year or even before then. I wrote an article about this experience that was never published; perhaps I should try again. I know books have been written about this subject that you can cite; you are always so great about including relevant articles. Thank you for all of your grief articles. Horrifically, I lost my husband as well. Your articles have been helpful for my continuing grief journey.

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I dreaded Mother’s Day after my son died. Then I learned to play again

Six years ago, I never thought I’d look forward to another Mother’s Day again. But this year I am.

It’s hard to believe given my memory of Mother’s Day 2018 is still so fresh. It was May 13 — 26 days after my son Tommy went to sleep one night and never woke up. It was also one day before what would have been his 13th birthday. It was the worst Mother’s Day imaginable, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive it. 

A national holiday that I always cherished suddenly seemed so cruel — ignoring mothers who have lost children , children who have lost mothers , and women who want to be mothers but for some reason can’t. Fortunately, my extended family showed up that morning to help celebrate the fact that I was still a mother with a younger son to care for in this world. Together, we silently nibbled on lunch. Then, like zombies, we shuffled through an art exhibit.

By late afternoon, I found myself sitting among 22,000 strangers in a Los Angeles stadium and watching a professional soccer match. Tommy was supposed to have been there, too.

As grief consumed me on the inside, fans were drinking, singing and cheering on the outside. Music was thumping, smoke bombs were firing and jumbotrons at both ends of the stadium were broadcasting strangers with broad smiles I couldn’t understand. 

I felt like an alien who didn’t belong. When the stadium erupted over the home team’s goal, something inside me snapped. Tears raced uncontrollably down my face as my entire being plunged into a thick darkness.

I felt like an alien who didn’t belong. 

When the stadium suddenly erupted over the home team’s goal my nerves jumped and something inside me snapped. Tears raced uncontrollably down my face as my entire being plunged into a thick darkness that surrounded me like quicksand.

“So, this is what it feels like to want to die,” I thought to myself as an indescribable loneliness settled in. Stronger waves of grief pummeled me from all sides until I touched a deeper layer of sadness I can only describe as terrifying.

That was the first time I ever truly understood why some people don’t feel loved even when they are, and why it’s so hard to convince someone to live when all they want to do is die.

In that moment, life presented two options: sink or swim.

Sinking meant succumbing to the bitter suffering I tasted that day and passing more of it on to my family and friends. I glanced over at my younger son, sitting to my left, and decided that was not an option.

As I began to swim away from my darkest thoughts and most brutal emotions, I allowed the sport that Tommy loved to provide some much-needed guidance.

“Play,” an inner voice whispered to me. 

“Play what?” I silently asked. The idea was so preposterous I thought I was hallucinating. Traditional medicine preferred I try talk therapy and prescription medications for my pain. How could I possibly “play” when my eldest son was gone? 

Guilt and shame were adamantly against it. Even though doctors didn’t have a medical explanation for Tommy’s sudden departure, the feeling that I had failed as a mother was overwhelming. 

Plus, play wasn’t my expertise. As a busy working mother, “playing” had stopped being a priority in my life. Career, marriage and motherhood had come first. Play was a luxury reserved for certain times of the year when I could squeeze it in — which is ironic because Tommy excelled at play. 

In the months that followed, the word “play” streamed into my mind dozens of times until it became clear that the activity that appealed to me the least was the one that would honor my son — and help me heal the most. 

“Play is called recreation because it makes us new again, it re-creates us and our world,” writes Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, in his book, “Play.”

So I set out to share Tommy’s infectious spirit of play with others and honor him by transforming a neglected field in a public park into a state-of-the-art athletic field for children to play on. To date, my family and a community I didn’t even know I had have raised over $2.6 million and gifted two “Tommy’s Fields” to Los Angeles, where I live.

On the outside, Tommy’s Fields have been everything I imagined and more. Each has replaced dried up and mostly deserted land and turned them into public spaces where children of all ages and abilities engage in healthy physical activity and multiple outdoor sports. Both have inspired other local communities to unite to improve their own neighborhood parks. And the fields have been meaningful additions to the city of Los Angeles, which suffers from a lack of public athletic fields for both organized sports, and free and unstructured play.   

On the inside, watching hundreds of children play on Tommy’s Fields every day has filled me with much-needed meaning and peace. Play has broadened my community and helped me make new friends. Through play I have discovered new talents, like writing, and fostered new interests, like yoga and meditation. Play has taught me that I can lose and miss my son terribly every day and still smile, laugh and make the most of my life the way he did.

That is why this Mother’s Day you’ll find me on Tommy’s Field in Westwood, watching 240 children with their families play in a friendly soccer tournament. Not only will I enjoy the benefits of watching others play, but with an ice cream in hand, a live DJ playing tunes in the background and friends and family by my side, I will be playing, too.  

Play has been a powerful medicine for me, and all it requires is a willingness to engage in it. Whatever play means to each one of us, it can lift our spirits during our most dire sink-or-swim moments.

In honor of Tommy, and for my own well-being, I strive to prioritize some form of play every day, especially on the hardest ones, like Mother’s Day. 

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Nikki Mark is the author of “Tommy’s Field: Love, Loss and the Goal of a Lifetime,” available now. She is also the founder and president of the TM23 Foundation , which opened the first Tommy’s Field in 2021 and the second in 2023, with a third in the planning stages. Her weekly articles, alternative healing toolkit and free gifts can be found at Nikkimark.com.

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• What a Hospice Nurse Wants You to Know About Death

I am asked all the time why in the world I would do something as difficult as working for hospice. People often ask, “Isn’t it so depressing?” It’s sad sometimes, yes. There’s really no way around that. But I don’t find my job to be depressing. In a way, it’s actually a sacred gift to me. The people I’ve met in their dying moments have changed my outlook on life, and far from depressing, I find their stories precious and inspiring.

Take Jason, 80, married, with children and grandchildren. When he was diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer and it was clear that he was in his final days of life, his whole family gathered in the home where he and his wife, Susan, had raised their children.

I had been Jason’s hospice nurse for a few weeks, and his condition, although terminal, remained stable. The last time I made a visit, however, his condition had changed.

In the couple’s bedroom, Jason was unconscious and unresponsive. Jason and Susan’s three children and several grandchildren were gathered around his bed, thumbing through a stack of photo albums. They were laughing and crying as each of them shared their favorite family stories and memories: trips to the lake, Christmas and holiday highlights, secret childhood mischief. The love surrounding Jason was everything anyone could ask for as they moved toward death.

Wanting to honor that time but also be available for whatever they needed, I stationed myself in an office space across the hall to record my notes about the visit. As I worked, I heard snippets of the family’s conversation.

“We love you, Dad. We love you.” “It’s so easy to love you.”

“You’ve been the best husband.” “It’s okay. You can let go.”

“We love you.”

The entire family had transitioned effortlessly with Jason’s sudden decline and were able to say goodbye the way they wanted. To me in the other room, it felt like a powerful, sacred love. It felt, ironically, like this type of death is what life is supposed to be all about.

What I do doesn’t feel depressing because I see patients get to have these beautiful deaths, being welcomed in love to a place that’s good . I get to witness families and friends really loving each other well. I get to help people who are dying feel comfortable as they die and help them and their loved ones embrace the reality of death—which helps them live better and die better. I see the power in what is possible as we faithfully accompany people toward death. And as professionals, or as loved ones, we have the power to make a real difference in people’s lives.

Read More: The Language of Hospice Can Help Us Get Better at Discussing Death

So often, I hear family members dismissing the experience of the person who is dying. It can sound a variety of ways:

“Don’t say stuff like that, Dad. You’re not going to die.”

“Don’t talk about how much you love me. You’re not going to die.”

“I don’t want to learn how to take care of the garden because you’re not going to die.”

I know this can be hard, but we do the person who is dying a disservice when we don’t let them speak their truth. They know that they’re dying, and they deserve space to talk about it. Is it comfortable talking about death? Rarely. Is it a way to honor and care for the person who is dying? Absolutely. It’s always time to talk about death. Talk about it when you’re sick. Talk about it when you’re not sick. Talk about it at the Thanksgiving dinner table. There’s never a time not to talk about death.

Talking about—and even simply being around—death is thought to be a painful experience. But it doesn’t have to be. Oftentimes, when a loved one is dying, I encourage their loved ones, to, pause and pay attention to what’s happening in you and around you. Notice the sense of stillness. Pause and be present in the moment. Notice what you feel and what you need. Take in the silence, or turn on music if you prefer.

At some point, you’ll make the call for the body to be removed from the home.

Eventually, you’ll phone everyone who needs to know.

Ultimately, you’ll handle other responsibilities. One day, you’ll wash the sheets and make the bed.

But when the person you love dies, there’s nothing that needs to be done immediately. Death is not an emergency. Give yourself the gift of pausing to be present.

Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully by Julie McFadden, RN with permission of TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Julie McFadden, RN, 2024.

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