On Getting Lost in/with Grief

My relationship with my mother is like riding a ferris wheel for a lifetime. Each moment on the ride offers a new vantage point. In the past two years, my mother has named that my current positioning is one in which I am responsible for listening to her stories, her grief, and her silly updates about the mundane parts of life. She reminds me that this is what daughters do for their old mother.

Last week, we were in the kitchen together. I made another cup of something hot (tea, coffee, lemon water, who knows…). She was cooking pasta. We had our usual check-in going and then she told me a story I had never heard from her. And I know that meant she had intentionally kept it from me.

It started with me telling her about how my father and I had talked for over an hour on the phone. Our relationship is complicated, strained and pained, but his voice and his storytelling provide safety. He takes up so much space when he is talking, even on the phone, that I know that my only responsibility is to listen. That bearing witness to him and his story is enough for him to be seen and heard. But my favorite part is when my father laughs. It’s so big and even on the phone I hear his mouth widening and his teeth flashing.

My father tells me about his older brother getting lost while on a neighborhood walk. My father laughed and laughed about it, the way a little brother should. It’s the laughter that is both silly and child-like, but also masking a fear or naming a vulnerability about a scary truth — his brother is getting old.

I tell my mother this story. She and I laugh. I repeat my father’s punchline and mock the way he told it to me. We laugh at both the story and at my father’s retelling of it.

Then there is a pause while I am grabbing a mug and squeezing past her at the stove.

“You know, I got lost once for a long time.”

Mommy! When?

“'I’m okay. It was a long time ago. When Victor was still sick, and everyone wasn’t okay, so I didn’t tell anyone. I remember, I dropped you off at the train station, then when I drove back to their house, I couldn’t find it. I don’t know which turn I missed. And sometimes, when I am driving there, I will try to go back and find out where I got lost but I can’t find it."

I grieve for that hour she spent in a panic, alone and unable to find her way.
I grieve for how we all have these feelings of loss and trying to remember where we took the our wrong turns and ended up here.
I grieve for the way we will be searching for what is lost for a long time until we discover that we can never get bck what we lost.