My mom died three days after Christmas in 2003. She was diagnosed with cancer the previous month and died the next. It goes without saying that it sucked, but probably not as much as one would think. It was too surreal, too sudden, and I was too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation. I understood that my mom had died, but it took a long time for me to understand that she was dead.

After she died there were things to do. Shopping for nice black clothes somehow seemed kind of fun. Family flew in from everywhere, and we had to get the house ready for them and for the funeral ‘after party.’ There were duties we all had to perform, and it was a busy time. Then it was all over, the holidays passed, everything went back to normal, I went back to school. Now my mom was dead. Now it really began.

But even still, while I definitely had days that were more difficult than others, days where it was far too real to ignore, ignore it I did for the most part. I buried it deep, shut it away where I didn’t think it could really hurt me. I became really good at ignoring – denying – my pain. It would bleed through, and often I would be sad and forget why…but mostly I soldiered on, and I got good at it. Too good.

By the age of fifteen I was a master of keeping it all at bay, which leads me to the point of this rambling: I have cried more tears, had more sleepless nights, and slipped into more daydreams about her in the past year than the previous twelve combined. It has led me to wonder despairingly, why now?

While meditating this question I’ve confronted some brutal truths about my coping mechanism and discovered long forgotten skeletons in my closet, all of which have led to my sharing this. I don’t want anyone to make the same mistakes I made.

The skeletons. The whole ordeal, when it happened, was traumatic. You’d think that that would go without saying, but at thirteen years old, I did not have the capacity to fully comprehend the impact losing a parent has on one’s mental health. There are two things that happened during her illness and after her passing that I literally forgot until recently, that I believe my brain decided to deny happened:

1) Up until recently, I thought that the last time I saw my mother was at home before she went to the hospital. Actually, the last time I saw her was at the hospital, a day or two before she died. She was on so much pain medication that she didn’t know who I was. She looked through me like a screen door.

2) My grandmother once drunkenly woke me up to accuse me of ‘not caring at all’ that my mom had died because, in her opinion, I wasn’t sad enough.

My brain automatically buried those two memories away somewhere where I guess it thought I would never find them. Had I continued on my war plan of ignoring true feelings of grief, I probably never would have found them, and they would have continued to lurk in my subconscious, making me feel invisible and terrible without knowing why.

The coping mechanism. I have always been the one in my family to try to keep the peace, to make laughter at the dinner table. I now think I spent so much time worrying about my dad and sibling that I forgot to worry about myself. And when I did remember, I would keep it secret and deal with it on my own, for their sakes. Months passed, and then years, and eventually so much time had passed between her death and the present that I didn’t think I was allowed to grieve anymore. This is a real thing I told myself. When I missed her, I turned to music – beating the shit out of a drum kit is very therapeutic and distracting. If I missed her in public and couldn’t distract myself fast enough, I went to the washroom to cry (I am very good at sneakily crying). I didn’t want my grief to be a burden for anyone else, and only when my truest friends would corner me and literally force me to open up did I ‘let’ anyone help me with my pain.

When I was eighteen I tried to kill myself. I have told very few people this, but what I have never told anyone is that when I woke up the morning after stuffing myself full of sixty anti-depressants (which Google assured me would do the trick. THANKS, GOOGLE), I realized I was still alive and I was disappointed. I had been unbearably full of despair and self-hate for months leading to this attempt, and I now believe those feelings stemmed from the pain I had buried, and from the loneliness I forced upon myself. A loneliness I went right back to after recovering from the attempt, from then to now.

This winter I lost my job because of how many days I couldn’t get out of bed. I’ve drank myself into several stupors (and debt), and the few nights I have had decent sleeps, I dream about my mom from the moment I fall asleep to the second I open my eyes. I have finally realized that there is no fighting it, no ignoring or denying it. Grief will find you. All I’ve been doing is putting it off.

Now I am done. I am done pretending that I don’t hate seeing my own damn reflection because I look so much like my dead mom. I am done crying alone in the bathroom instead of in the arms of a friend. I am done telling myself that I don’t deserve to grieve because others ‘have it worse’. I am done smiling through an aching heart for the appeasement of others.

The point of this very personal rambling is as I stated before, that I do not want anyone to make the same mistakes that I did.

Grieve. When you lose someone you love, it will always hurt. It is okay if it doesn’t stop hurting, even after thirteen years. You are allowed to reach out for love and consolation. You are allowed to feel angry. The longer you hold it all off – the longer you deny yourself the right to mourn – the more it will hurt you without you even knowing, and the greater the flood will be when you can hold it off no longer.