Best for:
Adult–children with grief from parent lost, parents struggling after their child passes loss, members of the dead-parents club, and readers of emotional essays
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
She was my best friend, my creative soundboard, my compass, and the person I counted on for everything. Losing my mom at her ripe age of 50, about a week before I turned 30, meant I had to become an adult overnight. Eight days before my thirtieth birthday my had to go and…
*pass*
Letting Go: The Life I Knew, Losing my Mom-
There are phases of life we outgrow naturally. Newborn, toddler, childhood, pre-teen, teen, young adulthood. Your first apartment, your first home, and retired all identities you once tried to force to fit, or even a song you couldn’t go a whole day without singing. Then there are the phases that get taken, much much too soon. Not traded in, or upgraded, not gently released, but ripped away from your fingertips in a moment that pulls your life into before and after.
The Abrupt End-
The before for me came to an abrupt and dramatic early end on November 7, 2021. When my mom, Stacy passed away at 50 years young. Eight, days later, and I had officially spent three decades here.
Grief is not a phase you graduate from; it is something you learn to live inside of, watching as the pain shifts and transforms over time.
I didn’t feel very up to celebrating. I don’t even Think I wanted to honestly, for the first time of my life. What I got instead was a crash course in grief and becoming. I learned how to become the oldest adult, independent, the responsible one, and most importantly besoming me, all alone.
The Phase Where We Said Goodbye
The moment that you know before you know, it feels a lot like anticipatory grief. Your mom gets a hospice intake, you are a healthcare worker and you know what that means. So when your sister looks at you and asks you what’s next you can’t help but if you stare at her well mine now actually. Leave blankie ALONE! Blankie, how do you get over your Jeep?
Hospital for Two
After she got sick but before she passed away, I lived inside a cynical kind of dread. One I couldn’t quite find the name for until I accepted she was leaving . They call it anticipatory grief: the mourning that begins before the start of the loss, when the person is still in front of you. I you can already feel the absence forming at the edges. You can see it in the difference when she inhales or exhales, or when you’re talking her ear off and she’s not carrying on about how loud you can be.
Watching Her Grow More Sick
Watching my mom get sick was like watching a slow tide pull me out to the shore you always stood on. I’d catch myself memorizing things, the way she laughed, the curve of her smile, the way she’d look at me if I was up to no good, the exact rhythm of her voice when she was excited about an idea, her heart beat at rest, the way she’d call just to check in and end up on the phone for two hours talking about everything and nothing, but honestly I tried to remember everything.
Making Peace with the Truth-
There came a point where I had to make peace with what was happening, not because I wanted to, but because fighting it felt cruel, to her, and to myself. Letting her go was not me giving up on her. It was the most humane, selfless, agonizing act of love I’ve ever had to perform. Praying to a God I don’t even believe in at all to just deliver my mom to peace before my birthday, was not an easy feat.If I am being real, I’ve never stopped grieving that choice, even knowing it was the right one.
Losing a person who truly saw you, who never required you to filter or polish you. This is how you witness the quietest moments in heartbreak, and the loneliest kind of pain.
More than Mom: My Person
People say “my mom” and I mean it is halfway correct at least a thousand different ways. When I say it, I mean my best friend, my creative sounding board, my first phone call when something’s happened good or bad, or simply put the one I could always rely on.
Our Own Language & More than Tolerance
We had a language of our own. I’d look at her a certain way or she’d look at me, no words just a vibe, but we would always be on the same page. She understood the way my brain worked, my tangents, passion projects, 2 a.m. spirals of inspiration, and my burnout. She didn’t tolerate me. She lived there and loved there too. She was the only person I never had to translate, filter, or polish me for.
Loneliness & Living With Grief
There’s a particular loneliness that comes from losing someone like that. It’s not just grief for the person, it’s grief for the version of you that existed around them only. When you were the most fully yourself. Losing my mom meant losing my witness, and learning to exist without someone who truly saw me has been the loneliest, quietest, and hardest part of this.
Grieving Son Holding it Together- Overnight
I’m the oldest sibling by nine years. That gap meant I’d always occupied a slightly different role part sibling, part adultiest–adult, and part person to set the example. When my mom died, my structure shifted in ways I hadn’t intended or planned for.
Suddenly becoming the anchor for everyone else meant I had to figure out how to grieve in the quiet spices while I holding the weight of the family’s new world.
The Biggest Kid
Suddenly, I wasn’t just the oldest. I was the one the younger ones had to look up to. I was the emotional anchor in rooms where everyone was drowning, which meant I had to figure out how to grieve quietly, or at least quietly enough to still show up for them. I had to learn to hold space for their pain, anger, grief, and more while finding somewhere i could privately work on my own.
Layered Grief
That kind of grief is layered and isolating in an earth-shaking way. You lose the only parent you had and, in the same breath, inherit a new weight. You become the family’s North Star before you’ve even figured out where you yourself are standing. There’s no preparation for it. You just do it. I mean it’s not like there’s anyone else who can, and I promised her I would watch over and take care of everyone else.
Birthday Celebrations: Pains Shadow
I used to imagine turning 30 as a milestone, me and my mom doing a dirty 30 photoshoot as planned. Like one of those birthdays people make a big thing of. We had it all planned out for ten years. I imagined calling her that morning and hearing her Voice be chaotic, loud, and proud. She was warm in that way only she could be.
Dirty Thirty: Alone
Instead, I turned 30 inside a grief so fresh it barely had edges yet all while starting to fall in love with Kelso. I didn’t know yet how big of a roll they would play, but honestly I have no idea what I would do without them.
She Passed Away 8 Days Before my Birthday-
My birthday happened the way things do when you’re surviving, technically, and without a giant ceremony. Kelsey and I got a hotel, some bottles of alcohol, and a hot tub. But I digress, what I’ve come to realize is that my day of birth now also counts something else. Not my turning one year older, like it used to be. But a date that now holds both the enormity of what I lost and the tally of the years as they tick-tock right on by .
There’s something about carrying both of those dates, November 8th and November 16, in the same week every year that makes me dread it for months to come. It doesn’t get smaller, better, or weaker it just becomes more easy to sit with. More familiar,
I welcome my grief like more of my old pals to pull into nature with you, or a scar that stopped being a wound but still won’t heal.
The Phase I Had to Say Goodbye To
The phase I lost wasn’t just the one where she was alive. It was the one where I still got to be somebody’s child, son, or a less adult me. Where I had a safety net that was made of another person, my mother. Where someone in this world had known me my whole life and loved me through every version of me
Goodbye is not Forever-
I said goodbye to the future we would have had. The memories we never made, holidays, kelso whom she would have adored, our late-night calls where she’d take my side even when I was wrong. The way she’d beg me to publish my projects. How we’d talked about doing everything together. I grieved things that hadn’t happened yet. This grief is strange and not linear. I grieve for all the new things I cannot share with her and all the times I’ve reached for my phone to call home.
Saying goodbye to that phase meant accepting that I would have to build something new. A version of myself that carries her influence without having her presently. That’s the ongoing work. Not moving on, but moving forward with her woven into my seams and all I do.
Finding My Mom’s Love Where it Remains:
Trying to find the threads that still remain,
grief is not a phase you graduate from, or one you progress through in a linear manner. It’s something you learn to live inside of and alongside differently as time passes. The pain shifts and transforms shapes. The memories get softer around the edges, but her love has yet to go anywhere.
The Lesson I Learned
What I’ve learned is that slowly, imperfectly, and unevenly is the way you work through grief, at least if you are me. The goodbye I said to that phase of my life wasn’t the end of her. She is still my creative sounding board, living in everything I create, every idea I chase, and every way I show up for the people I love. She’s in the petty salads attitude I cart. The stubbornness coursing through my veins and the way I still pick up the phone wanting to call her when something happens good or bad.
When I miss her so much I think I might Break I’ll turn to my sisters and we can share memories of her together.
So if you too have had to say goodbye in a situation like mine, one that held someone irreplaceable. Then I want you to know you and your grief are vapid. You have a home here.
Please feel free to share your grief stories in the comments or share with a friend who’s dealing with their own layers of grief.
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