The Truth About My Grief

And how guilt, love, and shame have learned to live together within me

To live is to experience loss. Grief. What I’ve never shared about mine is that I don’t think I deserve it. It feels like a permission I haven’t been granted.

When my father died, the emotion that came first and hardest was guilt. And regret. I was stuck trying to remember the last time we spoke. The last time I had seen him. He died on March 5, and I had planned to be home the following weekend for my birthday. I should have come sooner. Why did I wait so long? Did he know I loved him? When did I last tell him?

My thinking was frantic. The guilt came in waves, ones I kept slipping under, swallowing it, but somehow still bobbing above the surface.

Now, my mother’s death? That was a tsunami. A complete wipeout. The waves of guilt so high they ripped out everything in their path. I thought I’d be able to handle it, that surviving my father’s death had prepared me. Especially since I’d had time to “prepare” for hers—thirty days between her diagnosis and her passing. But none of that was true. Her death unmoored me in a way I never saw coming.

Guilt. Shame. Self-loathing. Looking back, I remember being unkind to her in her last days and weeks or at least, that’s how it felt. I had complicated and unkind thoughts. Was I truly unkind, or just overwhelmed? I’m still not sure. I just remember feeling… resentment.

She was emotional and cried often, and I felt quietly angry, drained of empathy, confused by my own coldness.

And putting that into words now, I see why I’ve struggled to write about my grief. Who wants to name this truth? To say: I loved my mother and I also resented her.