Once grief enters our lives, it never goes away.
How feeling sad on an ordinary day shapes our lives.
For the audio version of this essay, please click on the voice clip below:
I pull into the school parking lot thirty minutes before dismissal. After I park, I exhale and look upward. The sky is heavy with cloud cover, an ominous gray blanket hovering above me. Craving silence, I pause my music playlist and open the hardcover I borrowed from the library last week: Here After by
.Her words are sharp, reminding me of an old grief I never put into words:
It is, however, a relief to learn the famous Five Stages were not meant to describe my grief. This means I am not doing something wrong.
I find the more I learn of the commonly held beliefs about grief, the more I cannot understand how such grossly reductive and inaccurate ideas about bereavement can exist.How can grief be so universal and yet still so widely misunderstood?1
I close the book, pausing to absorb the stark truth she penned. This is my reality, too, one I’ve lived long. I find solidarity in her message. Almost ten years have passed since From Grief to Grace was published, the tome I wrote about the spirituality of our experiences with loss. In it, I explained my refutation of using the Five Stages by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to compartmentalize people’s suffering over devastating loss.
The Five Stages, I learned as a psychology undergraduate student nearly twenty years earlier, were intended for the terminally ill, not as a ubiquitous application to anyone in pain over a significant death.
Lin understands. She’s far away from me, but she knows what I knew ten years ago and tried to explain to those who furrowed their brows and cocked their heads, obviously befuddled by such a notion. It relieves me to know this is common knowledge now, that what I believed back then is accepted and understood by more people.
I lean against the SUV headrest and sigh. The clock reads 2:56 pm. Four minutes until the girls arrive.
The rain falls in fat droplets at first, splattering the windshield. I turn on the wipers, not because I’m in motion, but so I can still see what’s happening in the outside world.
Felicity opens the passenger door. “Mom,” she says breathlessly, “guess what Cooper said to Daphne today? That she is ugly and stupid, and Mrs. Greene didn’t do anything about it.”
I frown. “That seems unfair,” I tell her. “I think it’s her responsibility to correct that kind of behavior.”
Felicity nods. “Well, I did, at least. I always stand up to him.”
I smile. She is everything I wanted to be but wasn’t at thirteen: fierce, confident, and with a solid sense of self.
Sarah’s next, though it appears she’s been standing in the rain for several minutes. I notice Veronica running across the parking lot and gesture for her to open the door quickly. The girls both hop into the back seat, sodden but ready to unwind after another day of statewide testing.
I hear the younger girls banter about Veronica’s beloved stuffed animal—Dumbo—and how it was lost, then miraculously found at school. “A friend helped,” Veronica says.
My phone pings. It’s my mom: It’s in her lungs.
I know what “it” is: cancer. And I know who “her” is: one of my mom’s closest friends.
My heart falls. This isn’t surprising news, but I wanted it to be different. I always want what feels foreboding to somehow be wrong, but my gut never lies.
Oh no, I text back. This is awful. I’m so sorry.
Just then, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Tuesday’s Gone pops on my playlist. I forgot I turned it back on once the girls piled into the SUV. They like to listen to music on the drive home.
My brain feels fuzzy and disconnected from my heart right now, but the rain has picked up. It’s a steady stream of rivulets rushing down each vehicle. I focus on the black Jeep in front of me as a line forms to exit the parking lot. Droplets trickle like teardrops off the back windshield. I think of how Heaven must have opened its heart to cry upon us just now, to weep with us. To grieve. To feel the sorrow that’s ever-present in my heart.
Suddenly, I realize it’s Tuesday. And Tuesday, indeed, does seem gone with the wind.
Lin, Amy. Here After: A Memoir. (Zibby Books: New York, 2024, 152.