National Grief Awareness Day is this Tuesday and with it (hopefully) will come an onslaught of conversations, posts, or videos, about grief. I’m 19 years into my relationship with grief and I know a lot and not much at all. It rattles me some days just how fickle my relationship with grief can be. In moments of frustration, I wish it was more compact and that I understood it better. In moments of peace, I wish I didn’t know it at all.
Read MoreIt’s been almost 20 years since I first noticed how changing seasons affect my grief. My mom died in January 2003 and the transition of the season from winter to spring made me sad. It felt like I’d left her in the winter and would never get her back. It may seem silly to anyone who hasn’t lost someone personally, or who isn’t triggered by changing weather patterns, but for those of us who are, it’s subtle but real.
Read MoreI added a Sara Lee pound cake to our Amazon Fresh order this week. The craving I had was less for cake and more for a connection to my grandma.
The versions of her I got to know have been on my mind a lot these last few weeks.
Read MoreI was only 11 years old my first holiday season without my mom. As a result of my family and the culture they were raised in, there was no real space made to help guide me through those first holidays. When I was 21 years old and lost my grandma, I had a deeper understanding under my belt of what grief was and what it demanded of me.
During that first holiday season without her in 2014, I tried my best to find solace in places that made sense for me. I’ve always loved to find myself in books. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series for that exact reason - it was life-changing to me to see someone whose grief actually made them both more human and more magical all at once.
While the below reads aren’t necessarily the ones that guided me during my go arounds at the first holidays, it is the list I wish I had.
Read MoreA few days before our flight from NYC to Portland I had it on my calendar to pay a visit to the cemetery.
My family bought a plot of land in an empty cemetery decades ago. The first person to be buried there from our family was my grandpa, a man I only know by name, but whose death is felt across generations. At 27 years old, I’ve found myself staring at open-ended questions like, “What is death?” and “Why do we do this one thing after someone dies?” and answering them with statements like, “I don’t know, I’m just starting to define it for myself.”
There were traditions I inherited from my grandma and the generations that came before her that didn’t fit me like they had fit their conservative, Catholic upbringing. I’d outgrown them or never actually grown into them, depending on who you asked. The cemetery though was one that I’d taken up as my own.
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