What Happened to the Grief I Didn't Feel
Life is confusing. One minute my mom was here, we were talking on the phone about my girl problems and the next, I got called home from camp because she was in the hospital. A few hours later and she was gone. What does that mean she died? Nobody that I'd ever been close to had died in my life. I'd only ever understood it as this concept that people talked about. The concept of irreversibility, sadness, grief. Now it was happening to me? As soon as the doctor came out and told us "We lost her", I didn't have any of those emotions that people associate with death. I wasn't sad, I wasn't crying, I wasn't angry. I just was. Is there something wrong with me? Did I even love her?
That's what was going through my 15 year old head over the days following my mom's passing. I was utterly confused, in shock and numb.
Now, I know that there's no such thing as normal ways to act when someone close to you dies. Especially when it happens as suddenly as it did, with no time to process anything. Now, I know that whatever ways I was feeling were normal, for me.
Really, my biggest problem was that I never dealt with any of it. These feelings of numbness and shock continued for years. The two years after my mom died were ironically two of the best years of my life. I was smoking weed every weekend, starting to go to clubs, inviting friends over when my dad and brothers were out of town. I was even getting better grades in school than I ever had up to that point.
The last thing I wanted on my mind at all times was the fact that I was motherless. When I was younger, I always felt different than those around me. Now, I actually was different. The difference between after my mom died and when I was younger was that after my mom died, I found a solution to these feelings. My solution was that I didn't need to feel them at all. After all, I was told when I was younger that my emotions were not okay. So now, being older, I did everything in my power to not feel them. Studying, alcohol and weed were the solution that I had been looking for my whole life.
It wasn't long before this caught up with me though. By the time I graduated grade 11 and went to CEGEP, the feelings that I had pushed down for so long started coming out whether I liked it or not. At first, it manifested in anxiety and anger. I found ways to control my anxiety though. I mainly did it through school because this was one thing that I felt I had control over. I figured out in 10th and 11th grade that if I studied, I could do well, and so that's what I did. When I would do well on exams, my anxiety would dissipate, even if just temporarily. When that wouldn't do the trick, I would smoke weed and drink. Those three things solved my anxiety problem pretty good. For the most part at least. The anger though was a lot harder to manage. When I was indulging in these three maladaptive coping mechanisms, my anger started to come out sideways. It was as if I was trying to push a beach ball under water, and then when I was drunk or high or overwhelmed with school work, the beach ball would resurface sideways.
When I say sideways, I mean really sideways. My anger would come out at those closest to me and those who didn't deserve it. My dad, my brothers, my closest friends. The people who were there for me the most got the worst part of my anger. Over time, this pushed everyone away. My self fulfilling prophecy of being alone was brought to life through my anger.
I found myself in a lose lose situation, but I didn't know the way out. Honestly, I didn't even have a full understanding of what was wrong. Without having an understanding of what was wrong, how could I start to work toward fixing it? What was this grief word everyone was using and how could I heal it?
I had been seeing therapists my whole life, and even with that, I still didn't know what was wrong. The reason for that wasn't because the therapists weren't doing their job. It was because I wasn't letting them do their job. Without my honesty in sessions, there is no way for them to know for real what was going on in my life. I never disclosed any of my substance abuse to any of them until months before I went to treatment.
With the substances in play and my therapists not knowing about it, there was basically no way that I was ever going to treat the underlying grief that I never dealt with. I am now able to see that part of the reason I never grieved my mother's death is because I never allowed myself to feel. In order to allow myself to feel, I would have needed to stop using maladaptive coping mechanisms which would numb me.
Finally, in treatment, I got rid of the main thing that was holding me back from healing. With that, I began exploring this grief and the ways that I was coping with it. Actually allowing myself to feel was new for me. It was scary at first but being surrounded by a community of like minded individuals who were all pursuing the same thing made it easier. I was inspired by others who were making progress and others who were able to show their vulnerability and their emotions.
It was then that I realized that my first addiction to school was my way of honouring my mom. The way that I was using school was the same way that I used drugs. I got so caught up in the numbness that it brought me that I then graduated to an even stronger numbness in drugs and alcohol. Basically, in living my life for my mom, I wound up a drug addict. That drug addiction never allowed me to recover.
There was nothing wrong with that 15 year old boy. He did what he thought was best which was to push the feelings as far down as they can go. He didn't know that they would come out sideways throughout his life and hurt himself and those closest to him. He didn't know that it would lead him close to his death. He didn't know it would lead him to pushing away everyone he ever cared about. What he did know was that in the moment it would make him feel better, and that was all that mattered.
Of course I loved my mom very much. The two of us were as close as can be. We watched tons of tv together; The Amazing Race, The Bachelor, Chicago Fire; we talked about my interpersonal problems, which began before her death; we spent countless amounts of time together. The shock that followed her death was what a normal adolescent would feel after suddenly losing someone so close to them. The behaviours that followed were actually a misguided way of trying to show my love for her. Eventually, the drugs took over and became a beast of their own.
