It’s strange to shop for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards knowing you no longer have either a mom or a dad.
During last year’s craziness and all-around chaos, it didn’t hit me as hard that it was the first year I would not be sending my mom Mother’s Day cards and then the month later not sending cards to my dad. I remember having a quick stab as I shopped with the kids and having to overlook the “Nana” cards. At that point, it had been nine months since my mom had passed and the grief was buried under the more recent and sudden passing of my dad in late January. And yet all that was overshadowed by the ever-present pain in my chest; in part from the healing process of multiple bilateral pulmonary embolisms, partly from the squelched grief, and also from the desperate need to keep moving forward. Whatever it was, last year I was somewhat numb to it all.
This year, however, it was so blindly painful that I wasn’t picking out cards for my parents, that the kids weren’t looking at the Nana cards, and that we didn’t get Papa’s birthday and Father’s Day cards. Standing in that aisle, scanning the cards this year, it took all the willpower I had not to sink to the floor and cry. The pain of repressed grief burned in my lungs as a swiped away at the few tears I couldn’t hold in.
It was a simple but potent reminder of how life has changed. It’s still completely bananas to me that they’re gone. I’m not good at processing grief, it’s not something I’ve ever learned to do. I’m not a scream-and-cry-and-feel-it-all-at-once type of person, although at times I wish I could be.
Instead, I tuck it away and only feel it in small degrees. In those moments when I reach for my phone to call my mom to ask about my grandma’s recipe. Or when I want to send my dad a video of the fearless and crazy things the kids are doing (I did love sending those videos to my mom too. The calls I’d get of her yelling at me to be more careful were hilarious).
I miss my mom and dad and I mourn the absence of their presence in all the life moments yet to come.
