Grief in Knots: The Funeral

It was time for the family to go back for the viewing, but we were waiting on someone else. The funeral home asked if anyone wanted to go back alone.

I said I would.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I saw you in that coffin, Mom.

It felt like the nightmare you hope you’ll wake up from before it actually happens.

I knew you were dead.

I knew it.

But some part of me still believed that if I could just say the right thing, loudly enough, desperately enough, you might open your eyes.

I think I thought that even if you didn’t open your eyes, something in me could shift and I could find closure.

But each time I said it all, nothing changed in me, so then I would scream it all again.

And nothing was changing in front me or inside of me.

You looked like you.

You weren’t deformed. You didn’t look terribly sick. You hardly looked dead.

I looked at you and thought:

How could I have known?

And then I lost it.

“Mom, I love you.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I want my mom.”

“Everything is my fault.”

“Mom, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”

I screamed it louder.

And louder.

As though volume might somehow reach wherever you had gone.

The last thing I said to you while you were alive was that I loved you. I’m grateful for that.

But standing there looking at you, I wished I had said it in person.

I wished I had hugged you.

I wished I had kissed your cheek.

I wished for one more chance to make everything between us small enough that love could swallow it whole.

Mom, I am dying inside.

You didn’t wake up.

I tried so hard.

Eventually I stopped looking at the coffin and started looking at you.

The little freckles on your hands.

The bump on your nose.

Your fingers.

They looked exactly the same.

There was something strangely comforting about being close to you. I had spent days dreading that room, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave it.

Mom, there is a hole where you were.

When crying and screaming didn’t work, I got angry.

I wanted to punch the wall.

I wanted to throw something.

I’m getting angry again writing this.

I know you didn’t choose to leave me, Mom.

Of course I know that.

But my broken heart doesn’t care what my brain knows.

I was furious that you left me.

I was furious because you knew how much I loved you.

I spent so much of my life wanting to be a good daughter and wanting you to be proud of me.

And I needed you.

Sometimes I don’t think you understood what I needed because you spent so much of your own life surviving.

You grew up worrying about things I never had to worry about.

But I was fed, Mom.

You made sure of that.

You gave me a different life.

And because you did, my needs became different from yours.

Sometimes what I needed couldn’t be bought.

It couldn’t be fixed.

It couldn’t be put in a box or handed to me.

And sometimes we completely missed each other there.

But there were other times when somehow you knew exactly what I needed.

There were days when I called you because I was emotionally on the brink.

There were days when I was haunted and couldn’t get off the floor of my office because my body felt too heavy for my heart to carry.

And somehow, Mom, you could put your hand right through that phone and hold me.

You carried me.

That’s part of why I’m so angry now.

Because I still need you.

And you’re gone.

I feel like I’m screaming inside a heart stuck somewhere between what was and what can never be again.

I know I will never be exactly the same.

And then, while I was standing there screaming at you, I realized something.

It was the first time in my entire life I had ever spoken to you and you didn’t respond.

So I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore.

And then I stayed.

I had thought I would want to run from your funeral.

That’s what I do with pain sometimes. I retreat. I don’t particularly like being held. I don’t like being watched while I hurt. Give me a room by myself and let me figure out how to breathe again.

But I couldn’t stay away from you.

After I wore myself out, I stayed close.

I looked at your freckles on your hands.

Your face.

The way your nose had that bump I wish mine had.

All those tiny features that belonged to my mother.

And eventually I thought:

You’re not hurting anymore, Mom.

You carried wounds long before I ever existed. Some of them followed you through your entire life.

Some reached me, too.

There were things between us that I desperately wish had been different. There were things I needed from you that you couldn’t always understand. There were things you needed from me that I couldn’t always give without losing pieces of myself.

We hurt each other.

We loved each other.

Both things are true.

And death doesn’t sanitize the past.

And the past doesn’t have to be rewritten for me to miss you.

I don’t need to erase the hard parts to know that I would move heaven and earth today to have you back.

At your funeral, people talked about how much you helped people.

How compassionate you were.

How you could see someone hurting and immediately want to do something about it.

They were right.

That was you.

But compassion was complicated in our family.

Sometimes you could understand the wounds inside people who had caused wounds of their own. Sometimes I needed you to understand mine, but I couldn’t ever tell you outright.

I don’t think we ever completely figured that out.

Maybe we would have.

I thought we had time.

Goodness, Mom.

I thought we had time.

And there are things I wish I could tell you now.

I understand more about you than I did when I was younger.

I understand that you were mothering me with tools you had forged while surviving your own childhood.

I understand that some of the things you gave me were things nobody had given you.

And I understand that some of the things I needed were things nobody had ever taught you how to give.

None of that makes every hurt disappear.

But it makes me look at you differently.

And now there is Abigail.

Your granddaughter.

There are things that hurt you.

There are things that hurt me.

But they don’t get her.

That’s where this story changes.

She doesn’t have to inherit every wound simply because it came before her.

And, Mom, I wish you had understood that sometimes when I created distance, I wasn’t trying to stop loving you.

I was trying to stop pain from traveling another generation.

I couldn’t save the little girl you were.

I couldn’t save the little girl I was.

But I can protect mine.

And I’m going to give her the good parts of you.

There were so many.

Your generosity.

Your toughness.

Your ridiculous determination.

Your humor.

Your ability to make a catastrophe somehow seem manageable.

Your willingness to show up.

Your fierce love.

The way you could make me believe everything might actually be okay when I called you from the floor.

The way you came from so little and made sure your children had more.

Those things get to keep going.

Maybe that’s how families heal.

Not because one generation suddenly gets everything right.

Maybe one mother changes what she knows how to change.

Then her daughter changes a little more.

And someday my daughter will probably recognize things in me that I couldn’t see myself.

Maybe she’ll change those too.

One daughter at a time.

I may spend the rest of my life walking across some of the broken glass left behind.

But I’ll put my daughter on my shoulders.

She doesn’t have to walk through it just because we did.

And you don’t have to walk through any of it anymore either, Mom.

You’re free.

Nothing that haunted you can reach you now.

And that space between us that felt so enormous at the end?

It’s gone.

None of it matters to me standing beside your coffin.

I would move heaven and earth to hug you.

I’d kiss you on the cheek.

I’d tell you I’m sorry.

I’d ask you to forgive me.

I’d tell you I forgive you.

And then I’d probably hold onto you until you complained that I was squeezing too hard.

But I can’t.

And maybe that was what all that screaming was about.

For the first time in our relationship, there was nothing left I could say that could change what happened next.

You didn’t answer.

You couldn’t.

So eventually I stopped trying to find the words that would bring you back.

And I said the only ones that were left.

I love you, Mom.

I love you.

I love you.

And, I want you back.