Category: Grief

It’s the end of a busy week, but oh! What joy it has held. A few days before the anniversary of my mom’s death, I found out that a little book I wrote while in lockdown in Durban is going to be published. It’s called The Grief Handbook and it is a guide through the worst days of your life.

It’s my mom’s birthday today. 3 weeks to the day since the anniversary of her death. Three is my lucky number. There’s a symbolism in there somewhere, but I don’t know where it is.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts over the last five months. Particularly the grief podcast. Some funny, some light-hearted, some emotional and deep.

My mom died five months ago yesterday. And I was hit by such an overwhelming wave of grief last night that I feel I am back at square one. Waves of grief are the worst. What surprises me is not the timing of the wave – the 1st of every month has been hard, my dad isn’t feeling great, I was away this weekend so I had space and time for emotions to surface. What surprises me is the velocity and force of it.

I am truly blessed with my friends. I struggled with friendship drama in high school and the years following, but I have lucked out in the friendship department these days… My friends see me, understand me, reach out and check in on me even when the news is almost always sad and boring at the moment. I recognise how rare and wonderful that is, especially through grief.

Of all the things I didn’t anticipate about grief, I think the one that surprises me the most is the boredom of grief. I am so tired of being sad. I am so sad and tired. I have no new words to describe how much I miss my mom, but I still miss her achingly.

Things have been pretty hard and sad around here, as you can tell from all the depressing blog posts. But then Mark got hit by a car on Friday, and all of a sudden I was longing for the hard, sad days of before. It made me realise some big things about control.