Grief - A Year Later

Photo by author.

A year later -

The world wants me to be ok and move on but you and I both know I'm not -

I'm left with the finality of all the things we never could be -

I haven't spent the year gazing at the empty spaces you've left in my life because those were left three decades ago -

Instead, I've been grappling with 30-year-old wounds, with the reality of all the ways you weren't in my life and now never will be.  

There is no “what if this year is different” because every year will always be the same now.

There's no going back. There's no fixing. Death closed the chapter on our relationship and I'm the one left holding in all we never got to say and experience. I'm the one holding the grief for the two of us wondering where does one go when there's no going back but forward feels too heavy a load to carry. 

I struggle with guilt, knowing how you died. How neglected you were. How much the system and those around you failed you. How I failed you. And then the rage creeps in. It reminds me of all the fights I've had to fight on my own because you left me to figure out a world that wanted me dead long before I had the words to articulate it, by myself.  Some of them I won, far too many of them I lost, but all of them I faced without you.  

I'm supposed to find grace for you and for me. How does one find grace in the midst of all this pain? I'm working on seeing you as a person and not as my mother with the hope that by seeing your humanity, I can make peace with the ways you ignored mine. 

But it's hard because I wanted a mother. I needed a mother. I battled the world and my mind every day and the older I got the more alone I felt. As a mother, I feel that there is something missing, something you should have taught me or shown me. Like there is a lesson I can't quite grasp because the person I needed to teach it wasn't there when I needed and has now left this mortal plane ensuring I'll never really know the lesson I feel like I’m missing. 

That's not entirely your fault. We put the burden of sharing culture and shaping generations on the backs of mothers and deny them the love, support, and care they need and deserve, doubly so for Black mothers. You and I were set up for failure from the start. 

And yet I want to believe we could of been great with the right love and support.  That baking cookies together could of been a pastime we eventually did with my own children. That we could of shared inside jokes. That one day when I was older you would of told me why the only myth you ever taught me was the one about Medusa. 

It's in the space of could of, would of, should of that I grieve the hardest. That I yearn for you to hold me and tell me how deeply you loved me because I've searched for that love in the shattered pieces you've left behind and can't seem to fully grasp it. 

I know it has to be there. 

Somewhere… in the lipstick-stained photo of me.

 In the photocopies you made of Facebook pictures I posted a decade ago.  

In the rage-filled pages of your journal that never speak my name but have one unrealized goal, a blended family. I want to ask who encompasses this family mentioned in between manic scribbles. But there is no one to ask. 

Your hopes died with you. Unspoken.  Unfulfilled. 

All that's left is all the love that could of been. Carried by those who needed you the most. I've spent my life telling people that you learn to not care about the harm others do to you when the people who were supposed to care the most abandon you, and there's some truth to that. You learn not to let it show. You learn how to hide it away in a box, but the reality is you never stop caring, it never stops hurting. It morphs into something else.  Codependence.  People pleasing.  Isolation.  It takes hold of you and manifests itself in trauma responses.   

You grow desperate to be loved and cared for. You settle for love that's less than what you need because your mind is convinced less is all you deserve. The grief sits silent waiting until the day you're reminded that it's there. It never left. It's been quietly filling every chamber of your heart. Every beat reminds you of what you've gone without and what you'll never have. You try to push it down and not let it choke you as you fight to be indifferent to the weight you carry.    

A year later and I still feel as lost as I did the day you left this life. Maybe because I've been lost for years. Years of crying myself to sleep as a child and I never found my way. I just learned to pretend and give everyone what they wanted. Maybe you were pretending too. Pretending to be free when you were just as trapped as me. Our cages were different but built from the same material of others' expectations and assumptions.  

Your cage brought you to an early grave. I don't wish for mine to do the same. Maybe that's the lesson, that I must leave my cage before I’m buried in it. That I have the ability to leave the cage but it isn't easy. I don't have to be confined, though. 

One of us can be free. One of us can write a different story. 

I'm sorry we couldn't write it together.  I never wanted this grief and pain for us. We deserved so much more than what this life gave us. And as this year turns into decades I hope you know that I've always loved you, still do, and I forgive you. 

May your final rest be a peaceful one. 

Copyright(c) 2024 Rayven Holmes

grief a year later