Ever since I learned about my maternal grandmother, my heart has broken for the grief her life gave her. She died at an age decades younger than her 2 sisters and 2 brothers. They did not have her heartbreak. They were all much younger than my grandmother when their mother died. My grandmother was 11 years old.
Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer, yet I am relatively certain that is how my grandmother coped. She didn’t talk about the pain but it didn’t go away.
The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died, or that you lost custody of your child – both of which happened to both of my grandmothers actually. It is that you can’t talk about it.
You just want to run away, but you don’t know where you can run to. There isn’t any where to go.
Missing Mom 