A dear friend and spiritual advisor to me, Patti, a few years after my mother's death, sensed and gently hinted to me that I was still in deep mourning.
And the mourning was not just for my mother, but for all the losses I had experienced over the course of my life.
The loss of the man I met and fell in love with during my mother's illness and after her passing. The loss of coworkers I had created friendships with during my career. My high school friend's death from lupus. My grandmother's death when I was eight. My best friend's death when I was eight. My grandfather's death when I was five.
And yes, even the father I didn't really acknowledge. His death, one month after my birth, was "in my bones," she said.
Can we really grieve something we were too young to consciously remember losing? My friend suggested that at least part of my psyche was shaped by a loss I could not possibly have acknowledged at one month old.
During the course of my life, however, I have seen how I judged almost every significant relationship through loss, abandonment, and grief—whether it truly was abandonment or simply what it felt like to me.
In grade school, I changed schools about eight times. I never really thought it meant anything to me. I was proud of it, in a way. I saw it as building fortitude. Even as a child, I saw it that way.
But things changed when my best friend Aracely died at eight years old, in a car crash a few days before Christmas.
To this day, I remember with love the priest who allowed me to grieve during her funeral. After hugging her devastated mom, I sobbed recklessly against his chest, pouring all my tears, drool, and mucus down the front of his vestments.
And he just allowed me to sob. He held me close and didn't let anyone pull me away from him.
Father Joe.
I loved him so much for that, that he is the only man I ever briefly desired to be my father.
My mom pointed out later in life that after my best friend's death, I never really wanted to develop friendships again. The popular girl almost immediately became a loner.
When my sisters left for college, I knew I felt lonely, but I would never have termed it grief or abandonment.
My mom pointed out how lonely I was years later. My friend Patti pointed out the abandonment wound a decade later.
I was deeply disturbed by my dreams after my mother's death. The first was very vivid. It wasn't about her suffering or her passing.
I was standing in knee-deep water. She was holding my hands—real, alive in the physical. Then her substance began to change. I was seeing her physical body turn to water in my grasping hands, slipping like white milk into a body of water that turned into an ocean.
Feeling that. I could feel it. I can still feel it.
Slipping and being unable to hold on.
Her essence joining the ocean waters, but still being visible as milky white against the ocean blue.
The dreams that followed were constant.
I had many dreams in those early years. In my waking life, I didn't feel angry at her. I mourned her. But in my dreams, no matter how mundane the dream was, she was there—and I was angry at her. Sometimes for the smallest things.
She continued to be in my dreams until I stopped having dreams.
Yes, I stopped dreaming.
Doctors say everybody dreams, and I'm not going to argue that. All I know is that for about ten years, from my perspective, I stopped. It felt as though I dreamed perhaps once a year. And eventually the dreams stopped being visual. The dreams I could remember were just music. No visuals.
To be clear, I began dreaming again within the past two years. Odd dreams. Regular human dreams, I suppose.
I should have put two and two together earlier, but I didn't.
Despite the words Patti offered me, I personally didn't see myself as depressed, anxious, grieving, or as someone who had felt abandoned over and over throughout her life.
But I was angry at my mother for abandoning me, even when she had no choice in the matter.
Abandoned.
Every person who had left my life, willingly or unwillingly, I experienced as abandonment.
And I never stopped.
I never wanted to get close to people, particularly after my mother's death. I had friendships that were practically forced upon me. I tried getting out of them as much as I could, but they were determined friends.
And I am thankful for them in retrospect.
But I was not a good friend. And I still am not.
The friends I lost—I left them, to be honest.
I wanted to spare myself the grief, so I built walls and walked my own way.
It is quite one thing to move freely and be untethered.
But it is another to be tethered to pain, and thus make your decisions from that emotional perspective.
Today.
What does it mean to be truly free?
Not because I am perfectly healed. Not because I can't grieve still. But because I am aware.
And perhaps I can stop building the walls that kept me—
Loving alone.
Grieving alone.
But, always, alone.