The banality of grief
My mom died 14 years ago yesterday. As anniversaries go, it’s minor. We’re four years past a big one, a year away from another milestone, and six years from another big one. I’m used to her being gone, though I think about her every day and often wonder how life would be different if she were here. That obviously does no good, but it’s hard to shake the certainty that some difficult situations wouldn’t have occurred if she were around.
I worked with someone last year who lost a person very close to her—much different circumstances, but the same kind of incapacitating grief. I told her it would get easier; while the pain never goes away completely, it’s not as acute. It’s like the empty lot that remains after a building gets demolished. Something was there, and now it’s gone. You still notice that it’s gone, but you don’t constantly stare at the emptiness.
I was 26 when my mom died of inflammatory breast cancer. She never met my daughter (or my nephew or niece). She wasn’t at my wedding (though at least my wife knew her). She never saw me land my dream job. She never saw me become a real grownup—I was basically this when she died:
I turned 40 in March and am, by all measures, an actual adult. More of my friends have lost parents or loved ones, and I’m not so quick to talk about my mom’s death as I was when the pain was so close to the surface. I’m much more aware of the sadness people quietly bear. There’s nothing like a deep personal loss to make you more empathetic. While I’ve long since grown used to my mom being gone, every now and then it still packs a punch.
Like yesterday, on this nothing of an anniversary. I happened to be listening to the Uncle Tupelo anthology when “Still Be Around” came on, and I barely kept it together. I intensely associate that song with my mom’s death, because the anthology was in my heavy rotation at the time.
To this day, I’m not 100 percent sure what “Still Be Around” is about. It speaks about problems with alcohol more than anything else, but it conveys a powerful sense of loss: Jay Farrar sings at the beginning, “I don't see you through the windshield / I don't see you in faces looking back at me.” One week after my mom died, I was driving around Houston and passed the hospital where she took her final breath in front of us just seven days prior. Even if the song is about something else, I literally was looking through a windshield as it played, perhaps looking for some sign that this immensely important person in my life would, uh, still be around somehow, some way.
I wish I could say my memories of her are enough, that her influence on my life keeps her close to me, that I still feel her presence. It doesn’t work that way, at least not for me. And that’s the banality of grief: In time, it ebbs into the background—never going away, but not incapacitating you, either. It’s just there, a thing you carry for so long that you don’t even notice its weight anymore.
And in the end, that has to be good enough.