Don't let guilt steal your grief

In the aftermath of great loss, I get curious about the afterlife, hug some trees, look for signs in the form of gopher turtles and pelicans and find other ways to lighten my heavy heart.

To love deeply is to always risk loss—but would we want it any other way?

I sit up in bed at four o’clock Sunday morning, wide awake and aching. Not just my heart but my body. I am nauseous and dizzy as I hurry to the bathroom. I crawl back in bed, spent. What is wrong with me?

Ah, grief. In all its many guises. Exactly a week ago my mother died, at 87, as dementia released its grip, as I wrote about here. Last Sunday I was tossing water and snacks in a bag, speeding my way to the memory care facility, not wanting to miss a moment, hoping to keep her with us a little while longer. Yet she was fearless and determined to the end. As she lay in bed, her eyes searching our faces, she squeezed our hands tight, my sister and I, to console us, not herself—because she was ready. She mothered us to the end. She was saying, “I love you but it’s my time to leave this life and you will be alright.”

And so we are left with the grief. And with it, the other “G,” guilt. Why is it that guilt so often accompanies grief? All the “could have’s” and “should have’s,” the “what-ifs.” That grief research finds a direct relationship between grief and guilt and that I am not alone in this experience doesn’t assuage the pain. No matter how many well-meaning family and friends tell me what a wonderful daughter I was, how much I did for Mom, I think instead about what I didn’t do, the days I didn’t visit her in memory care. I can’t bear the thought that she ever felt lonely or abandoned as I went about my life. This is what hurls me into wrenching sobs and pounding walks along the beach, every wave crashing to shore a judgement. Could I have done more?

As I seek guidance and perspective, I am reminded that guilt steals from grief. It keeps us from feeling the depths of our sadness and loss. And at the same time, by accepting that guilt, disappointment, and regret are all legitimate feelings after the death of a loved one, perhaps there is another way to think about guilt: as a sign of how much I loved my mother. I wanted everything to be perfect. But no one is perfect—not her, not me. Instead, there is a more lovely, gracious story to embrace: that things went exactly as they were meant to go. It is impossible to know where different choices may have led. Revisionist history serves no one in these circumstances. And there’s this, too: my sister and brother and I may have wanted our mother to live longer, but did she? Her increasing withdrawal these final months, weeks and days told us that she was already more than one foot out the door, ready to cross to whatever exists on the other side.

I am not sure I know what lies on The Other Side, or even if there is an other side after death. I was raised Jewish but have not been observant for many years. I want to believe in an after life. I believe in God, or a higher power, or something, and that’s increasingly the case as I get older.

And so when I am introduced to the work of Laura Lynne Jackson, a scientifically validated psychic medium, I am open to learning more. A dear cousin sends me Jackson’s books, The Light Between Us: Stories from Heaven, Lessons for the Living and Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe. My cousin tells me that even now in her 70s, decades after the death of her mother, she still feels her vivid presence as she wraps herself in a blanket her mother crocheted. An energy that seeks to comfort her.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

I fall into Laura’s story—how this gift appeared in her childhood with an urgent knowing that she had to accompany her mother to visit her grandfather who died weeks later; it was her last visit with Pop Pop. When his spirit, or rather his light, comes to her in a dream she know she is different than others. And indeed over time she discovers she is clairvoyant (the ability to gather information about people and events through means other than the five senses), clairaudient (the ability to perceive sounds through means other than one’s ears) and clairsentient, (the ability to feel things through nonhuman means—for example, what she describes as people’s “energy footprints.”) She recounts story after story of people she has helped to make sense of a devastating loss, and the guilt that remains for the one left behind.

To one mother, with the crushing sadness of a child who died at three, Laura reports back from the child who “comes through her”:

“You must let go of the guilt. You feel you failed her as a mother because you couldn’t save her. But it wasn’t your role to save her. It was your role to love her.”

“It was your role to love her.” Isn’t that what we’re all put on this earth to do, love our people? And that if we do that well, the love lives on even when their earthly presence is gone. I ask my two thoughtful, open-hearted, empathetic daughters for their views on the afterlife. We are checking in with each other often these days. They were very close to their grandmother. She outlived all three of their other grandparents. It is a hard loss. My oldest, Marielle, tells us about the conversations she had with her Swedish grandfather when she was twelve. An idea of the afterlife began to form in her mind that has always comforted her. Here is the essence of what she told us:

“When we die our soul, our spirit, is essentially energy that is carried by memories of us and anyone we’ve touched throughout our lives. Our spirit is fragmented rather than being contained in a physical body, and those fragments live on in all the people we’ve ever touched. And then I think reincarnation happens when everyone you’ve ever touched have all left this world and their souls have fragmented and your spirit is reassembled, or some parts of it, in another bodily form, in a more concentrated way, that allows you to carry forward—to continue in the same spirit. There’s never been anyone exactly like you but there are little pieces of you scattered around the world even when you go.”

My younger daughter Sara and I tell Marielle we love this perspective. They laugh, saying that this view on the afterlife is not so different from a beloved Disney film, Coco, in which aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer. The movie features this beautiful song, “Remember Me.”

Remember me though I have to say goodbye
Remember me, don't let it make you cry
For even if I'm far away, I hold you in my heart
I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart

We all grieve differently. And my daughters, each in their own way, are showing me how guilt does not have to be part of it. I do believe in signs—that butterfly magnet that was in my path when I asked my late best friend for a sign; the gopher turtle crossing in front of me as I made my way for a sunset walk on the beach a couple of days after Mom died; the pelican that swooped so close to my head as I stood in the water it startled me and, unexpectedly, made me laugh. My mother’s sense of humor, a part of me now.

My mother was a tree hugger. She loved trees—not so much palm trees, which she found distinctly unhuggable although she came to love Florida’s magnificent banyan trees. And so it was fitting that Sara, who lives in Paris, took the opportunity to hug a majestic tree in Parc de Bagatelle in the days following the death of her grandmother.

Sara in Parc de Bagatelle

As I write this essay, it is Earth Day and the first night of Passover, a celebration of hope, gratitude and grit: three qualities my mother embodied. Sara, her grandmother’s “favorite greenie” as my Mom once said, will go out and hug another tree. I also spend some quality time with a beautiful banyan. And Marielle, whose deepest emotions have found expression in poetry since she was a young girl, shared this poem with us. She wrote it the night of her grandmother’s death, on the balcony of her sister’s apartment, looking at the starry sky:

My sister and brother and I call each other often these days. Next month the family and many friends will join us in Florida for a celebration of my mother’s life. In the meantime, my siblings, too, are struggling with guilt amid their grief. In comforting them, I comfort myself. I tell them, “Mom would not have wanted us to feel guilty and think about what we see as the mistakes of the past. She only wants us to remember the love.”

From my well-read copy of his volume Still Possible, I turn to these stanzas from David Whyte ‘s poem, “Sharing The Grail,” about sitting at the bedside of a loved one who is dying:

Excerpt from “Sharing the Grail,” by David Whyte, from Still Possible

Grief has a way of putting things in perspective. I think of my mother always being so proud of my writing and my dreams to publish a novel one day. Marielle shared with me a video clip she captured of her grandmother about a year ago. When asked how she knew I would be a writer, even with dementia clouding her mind, Mom told her: “I just knew because that’s what she wanted to do. I just knew that’s what she wanted to pursue.”

I believe the novel I’ve been working so hard on these past few years is the one I was meant to write—for her and for me—and hopefully many more readers. I also love this space for writing essays from my heart and have been so gratified to have 450+ readers subscribing—truly, beyond my wildest dreams. I have published consistently twice weekly for eight months now (this is my 80th published post!) and it’s been magic every time I sit down to write for me and for you. It is the kind of writing that fills me up, where time stands still. The best kind of writing.

But the twice-weekly cadence has been a lot while holding down a full-time corporate writing career and until just a week ago, the responsibilities of a caregiver for Mom. It has meant other priorities get less time, like my novel. And time is short, isn’t it, to do the things we really want to do while we’re here?

“Living in 3D” isn’t going anywhere although it will, like me, evolve over time. I will still be publishing one essay/newsletter every Tuesday, with the same thoughtfulness, depth, and quality that I’ve sought to bring here from the start. And while there won’t be a second weekly essay for paid subscribers, whom I cherish more than I can say, I will continue to offer you personal voiceovers of every essay, occasional podcast interviews or perhaps future zoom chats for community members if that is of interest.

I have heard anecdotally that my paid subscribers can’t keep up with my essays twice weekly, so perhaps this won’t matter in the least to you. It might even be a relief. But I’ve anguished over this decision because it’s hard for me not to honor a commitment I’ve made. Yet if the journey I’ve been on this past couple of years—and all the insights I’ve shared here—has taught me anything it is that we must honor the commitment to ourselves if we are to be fully present for others and to everything this beautiful life has to offer.

If you would like to support my writing, there is still time to take advantage of a 20% discount for the rest of April, my birthday month, to become a paid subscriber.

I am grateful to you for inviting me into your inboxes each week. I look forward to meeting you in the comments. Thank you for being here.

Question for the comments:

Have you found guilt to be part of your grief process? How did you work through it? What has been most helpful to you during times of grief?

Three Songs for 3-D

Divorce

“Crack the Case,” Dawes

I wanna call off the cavalry
Declare no winners or losers
And forgive our shared mistakes
You can pick the time and place
Maybe that will crack the case

Dementia

“Time and Space,” Olivia Fern

Time and space cannot erase.
Time and space cannot separate
you
from the ones you love.

They’re in the touch of the breeze
In the wind whispering through the leaves.
They’re in the song the birds sing,
to bring the dawn in
Singing
“Wake up! Don’t miss this opportunity to love.”

Destiny

“Sweet Home,” SYML

My mother was my home and I was hers: a destiny written in the stars.

Welcome home
Your last and only one
Never more to roam
Have no fear
If you don't see the sun
I will hold you close
Welcome home