The Early Days Of Grief A Survival Manual

Grief is one of those things – like parenting – that you only really understand once you’ve lived through it.

- Bridget Mcnulty

The lack of magic words to cure grief really pissed me off, to be honest. Before my mom died, words had been my solace. They had been able to describe, in minute detail, how I felt. They had offered a way to vent or explain or move through feelings that always made me feel better. They had been a bridge to other people.

But suddenly they didn’t work. All I could do was describe the facts and try, somehow, to wrap my head around them.

My mom was a healthy 72-year-old. In late May, she started complaining of sore feet and persistent acid reflux. In mid-June she said she’d lost weight and was really tired, so we sent her for a battery of blood tests. The tests showed an abnormally high cancer count, so she was admitted to hospital. The next day she had a stroke, and the doctor gave us the diagnosis: ‘the worst possible scenario’. Ten days after that, she died.

My mom – my constant compass, daily cheery WhatsApp sender, biggest fan and best friend – was gone.

In the wake of her death, I came unmoored. I had flown to Durban from Cape Town as soon as we got the diagnosis, and my husband and kids and brothers and nephews and nieces all made the journey too. After her funeral, we flew back and I tried to make sense of a world in which I had no mom. Everything I looked at around my home reminded me of her: the obvious things, like the quilts she had made us and the earrings she’d bought me, but also the recipe book filled with her recipes, the cream cheese we both loved, the plants I had stolen from our childhood home. Nothing didn’t hurt.