Grieving as a Grown-up

My mother died thirty years ago, a lot longer ago than I've been alive. I was twenty when she passed. Twenty is an age when self hasn't been defined beyond self. Twenty year olds are self-involved. As I recall, the earth was revolving around me so when my mother was no longer in that world, my reaction was devastation that she wasn't in MY life. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't in THIS life. She was ready to go, my father begged her to stay and I just waited to see how I would be affected by whatever she did.

My father died three years later and even at twenty-three my life was still mainly about me. It was worse than my mother dying because anything that I had attached to her had shifted to my father. Without his knowledge, he was carrying a lot of my baggage around when he passed on. I saw myself as a suddenly burdened twenty-three year old orphan who couldn't fathom what to do or how to do it.

One of these days I'll write about how their dying was the kindest thing they ever did for me. But not today.
Today's musings are about grief. I left the town in which I grew up shortly after my father's passing. I drove four days in my Buick LeSabre to a state most people don't even really believe exists. It took twenty-one years for me to return to my birth state and my hometown. That gap of time was determined more by circumstances than desire or lack thereof. When I drove my rented car into the town of my youth 21 years later, it was as if I was half dreaming. Instinctively I knew where to turn and what roads would lead to locations of importance. But like a dream, it barely seemed like a real place where I had really lived. I speak only in the physical sense because emotionally I connected immediately. I began to cry as soon as I got near my childhood home. Tears blurred my vision driving past Deane-Porter School, Forrestdale School, the high school, Holy Cross Church and even Hower's grocer which wasn't even called that anymore.

I had to pull-over and sit and compose myself. My soul was sick with all of the heaving and weaving and lurching tearing through it. It took some time before I realized that the tears and sobs were the symptoms of grief. I was mourning my parents as a grown-up. Now that I was an adult I saw them from an adult's point of view. I was a different person going through the fresh pain of losing a parent. I was never conscious of when the world stopped revolving around me but it did become clear as I sat in the car and recognized my parents as adults, as an adult myself. How deeply dimensional they became and how hurt I felt to know that I would never know them in that way.

Thomas Wolfe's "You can't go home again" is a tired cliche that gets dragged out for any old occasion to prove a point. I can't quote him with any truth. You CAN go home again. It's just that when you do go home again, it becomes what you have become: better, more experienced, more compassionate, more prepared, more whole. More.