My Personal Relationship with Grief

Within my twenty-six years I have experienced death quite a few times- some being friends and some being family members. The most profound death that I’ve experienced was the recent death of my mother, Amber Maye Rankin. She was 49 years old on the day she died. A heart attack is what brought her existence to a screeching halt. I received a call from the hospital at 12:37 pm on January 13th. I’d just finished washing dishes and was listening to some energetic pop music when my phone started ringing showing the contact “mom”. A day had gone by since we’d last spoken, which for us was a pretty long time. When I answered, the woman’s voice on the other end of the line was not, in fact, my mom. The call lasted about a minute. After hanging up I felt as though the entire planet had lost its force of gravity. I could feel the tilt of the planet and a shift within my existence. 

My mom and I were incredibly close, best friends by some standards. We did everything together. She occupied a large space in my life. I am grateful that I was always honest with her, appreciative of her, and loving to her. I hold no regret for any of our interactions. She knew that I loved her with all of my heart and that I would have always done anything for her. A value, lesson, and personality trait that she passed on to me is servitude. Being a servant to others brings good karma and a lack of resistance. I could pen a long list quantifying our relationship but you can trust me when I say we: were each other's pillars in this life. Since I can remember she would always tell me, “It’s you and me against the world”.

So how am I? How am I doing forty-four days after losing the only person I’ve had with me since I entered this plane of existence? I’m okay. Truly. I have been able to feel happiness and joy. I have felt despair and sorrow. Within this life I have already intimately faced bliss and emptiness. This experience has not given me my lowest lows, not even close. I was a very depressed and tormented soul up until the last couple of years. For the last forty-four days I’ve felt an immeasurable absence. Grief for my life-giver has felt like an abyss. It’s not been too dramatic, it's just vast and lonely.

Contemplations on Grief

I think there are different ways one can relate to and experience a state of grief. I’ve narrowed down these many relations to five main reactions/ contemplations, each of which I’ll explore briefly. 

Acceptance:

I have practiced meditation for a decade and I’ve practiced yoga for the past eight years. With these practices has arisen a sense of inner peace and acceptance for all that is. Meditation has taught me that I am nothing and everything simultaneously. Yoga has taught me that all energy can be shifted, processed, and transformed. I accept that people die. 8,091 people die on average every day within the United States. The leading cause of death within this country is heart disease. My mom’s death was no anomaly, in fact it was quite ordinary. I accepted it upon the first moment I was told that she was dead. I was in shock, yes, but I was able to hold myself upright and function because I know that death is an inevitable conclusion to every life lived.

Avoidance: 

I question if avoidance is an antonym to acceptance. In one sense, complete avoidance of a situation or occurrence isn’t healthy. In another sense, my ability to compartmentalize and avoid certain states and emotions at certain times has been a tremendous benefit to me in life. I am able to create and maintain personas, I am able to stay professional and positive in my place of work, I am able to “push through” just about anything. I’m not saying I do this often. I’ve learned that the repercussions of compartmentalization are dangerous and destructive. I choose to be authentic almost always. But I have found myself avoiding my sadness and emptiness at certain times when I simply “got shit that needs to be done”. 

Perseverance: 

I am an incredibly resilient person and I will fight until I am dead. I came into this world at 27 weeks of gestation with a 55-80% chance of survival. I’ve been fighting (much to my husband’s chagrin) ever since. I can’t and won’t let anything knock me out. Life might knock me down… hard. But I will not let it knock me out. I believe that we all have a choice in our perceptions of life events and our reactions to those same events. I could shut down, be depressed, and wallow (which I will touch on in the next paragraph) or I could use every hard thing I’ve experienced as fuel to motivate me to be the best version of myself. I have done both, I just work hard to do the latter with much more frequency. 

Wallowing:

A good cry can move around emotions like no other. There is sacred power in saltwater. It conducts and alchemizes. I have always held this opinion intrinsically. I’ve wallowed a few times since the death of my mom. Dramatic moments like: hugging her shoes a couple days after she died posing the question of “why?” to the Universe, putting her ashes in the spot on the couch where she’d always sit as we talked into the night after putting my girls to sleep and sobbing until I finally passed out, and listening to her voicemails while holding so much anguish in my body have occurred I’ve given myself time and space to wallow. It doesn’t feel good, in fact, it is dreadful, isolating, dark, lonely, and incredibly painful. It doesn’t feel very productive but I do it because I have no choice. The pain has to come up and out in all of its expressions.

Physical Memory:

Our emotions are stored within our physical body. These can be either positive or negative emotions with varying physical effects. This information is nothing new to me. Something that has been really interesting to experience is my body’s unconscious ability of remembering or maintaining space for my mom even though I consciously know she is no longer here. My mom would come over to my house every Tuesday, Thursday, and most Sundays. I’d see her every morning when I’d drop off my youngest daughter at her house and I’d see her every afternoon when I’d pick her up. We’d often make weekend plans. My mom’s existence took up a lot of space within my life and now that she’s not here my body anticipates her arrival even when I know that won’t be happening. I also fell extremely ill on the one-month anniversary of her death and I was diagnosed with both Covid and Influenza B. Our body systems are intimately tied to our emotional states and both of these aspects of myself have been unbalanced as of recent.

Different Perspectives on Death, Afterlife, and Grief

Everyone maintains their own beliefs regarding what happens to a person and their consciousness after death. Christians and Muslims believe they will be judged at the time of death and be assigned to carry the weight of their sins in torment and damnation. In the case that they were saved or obeyed God during life, they will be granted permission into heaven. There are differences, of course, but the general premise between these two religions is very similar. Hindus believe in a cycle of death and rebirth of a specific soul through a process called reincarnation whereas Buddhists believe in a cycling of energy with an energetic marker called karma. 

I believe that a person’s energy and influence is deposited into every person they interact with within their lifetime in different capacities. This is applicable in both life and death. We leave energy with the people we speak to and share our ideas with. That energetic memory does not simply disappear at someone's death, rather it remains. There is a quote from a show called The Good Place that has accompanied me throughout my grief. It reads:

“Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it. It’s height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave. And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.” 

Moving Forward

My mom often told me she was proud of me although, to be honest, I have rarely felt proud of myself. It’s probably a character flaw of mine. I know I’ve achieved things and I have much to be proud of. But pride in myself or my accomplishments is not an emotional state I can claim. My mom was the same way and I feel like my lack of pride in myself (and maybe even self-esteem and confidence) was learned from her. I think internally she may have felt shame or embarrassment for some of her choices both past and present. I can relate to that immensely although it's uncomfortable to admit. In her honor and to resolve that karmic conflict, I want to learn to feel truly content with and proud of myself. I want to learn how to actually love and care for myself in a way that I’ve never witnessed any other woman do in real life. I study, investigate, increase exposure to, and research how people become successful. My conclusions are that when people make daily choices that are in alignment with who they believe they should be, they feel good which in turn energetically aligns them for progression, evolution, and ultimately success. I want that for myself and I want to teach that to my girls. I want to feel peaceful and proud of my choices and daily actions, not ashamed of them. I want to learn to eat, move, speak, and exist in a way that proves that I love myself and I believe that I deserve good.

My mom deserved every good thing that this life has to give and I did the best I could to show her love always. She did the same for me. She was incredibly selfless and she loved and cared for the world more than she ever loved or cared for herself. That is the difference I want to make for both of us. I want to love others while simultaneously learning how to love myself. I want to take care of others while simultaneously learning how to take care of myself. I want to dedicate the same amount of time and effort towards nurturing myself as I dedicate to my family, my students, and my loved ones in general. Our breath, our internal organs, our voices, our hugs, and our lives could simply cease to exist at any moment. I want to ensure that I am living a life that I am proud of or at least know that I fought like hell to do so until the day I die.