11 Healthy Ways to Grieve by Margaret Howard

Mainstream American culture wants to kill grief.

My mother died last August. I am still grieving, but much more privately now. Even though it’s
been barely six months it’s clear that, for the most part, I am supposed to appear bouncy and happy and project that I have “moved on” with my life. Ha. 

My relationship with my mother was a jumble of gratitude, love and unending struggles toward forgiveness, alternating with colossal annoyance and resentment and more unending struggles toward forgiveness (that went both ways). But the less-than-perfect dynamic of our relationship didn’t make losing her any easier. I still cry every time I reach for the phone to call her before I remember she’s gone. My mother’s absence from this world remains at once constant/overarching and sudden/stunning. My mother’s absence keeps blasting up at me randomly, like I’m forgetting I live on a field of geysers. That is grief.

​We think of grief* that lasts beyond a very short window (funeral, visitation, a short leave from work if we’re lucky, or maybe six months of “reasonable” sadness if we adhere to some guidelines) as a weakness; a spiritual failing; a mental illness; a temporary, linear process of inconvenient but required steps toward a past state of non-grieving that should be gotten through quickly. We’d better be back at it and ready to produce within a week or two, by God, or something is wrong

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