People can die of a broken heart. The official cause written on your parent’s death certificate won’t read “death by grief”, but possibly the downward spiral of pain from a deep loss is what ultimately led to their passing. Were you like me, standing by helplessly, watching your mom or dad slowly sink into the sands of grief after their spouse died, shedding layers of themselves until they were nearly unrecognizable? Are you feeling left alone in the world, wondering why all the times you held out your hand they didn’t reach for it and hold on?

Maybe this post needs a content warning. It’s going to get a little heavy in here today. In this post I describe some details about my mom’s death with mentions of blood, which might be too much for some right now. We’ve got to take care of ourselves, lovelies!

Although if you found this blog because your parent died, you are familiar with grief. Nearly every post on this site is about grief, death, and loss (and simultaneously it’s about love, life, and feeling better!) so maybe all of my writing deserves one giant content warning. We talk about Big Feelings here, and so, dear friend, don’t read on if this topic might be too sensitive right now. Focus on healing your heart. Drink water and don’t forget to eat. You are loved and important.

(I’d love to hear from people if certain topics or ideas are too triggering even for a grief blog. My intent is to help people struggling with grief, not to hurt your heart or keep you up at night with imagery. So let me know what you think about this sort of thing if you want by commenting at the bottom of this page.)

And with that likely too lengthy disclaimer, let’s move forward friends.

After my mom died, a particularly insidious thought crept into my mind–why wasn’t I enough? Why didn’t she try to stay alive for me? Why didn’t she try harder to be healthy, heal herself, and grow stronger? Why did it seem like she gave up and let death happen? What mother wouldn’t cling to life with all her strength to remain with her child? Why didn’t she love me enough to stay?

My mother struggled through an abusive marriage to my father for 33 years and didn’t initiate a divorce until I was living overseas after college. She was in her mid-fifties when she finally met and married a man who loved and cared for her. She felt blessed to marry him. It was wonderful to see her finally love and be loved.

Her husband died of a sudden heart attack after 12 years of marriage, and my mother was instantly heartbroken. (I wrote some of her story here.) This was the first time I’d ever had to watch and witness someone while they truly experienced deep grief over time.

Have you ever watched someone grieve in this way? Have you had to watch as someone you loved or leaned on collapsed and fell apart? Did you try to lift them up, but somehow what they were dealing with was too heavy and too deep for your efforts to work? When this is you, witnessing your own parent grieve, it’s easy to feel like a young child again, tugging your parent’s sleeve, trying to get their attention.

My parents regularly brought me to visit my grandparents’ graves in Buffalo as a child. They pulled up the weeds and cleared leaves around the headstones. My mother brought potted flowers to place down, usually a pink or white hyacinth around Easter when the snow was just beginning to melt. I’d fidget and catalog the complicated Polish last names on the stones around me, consonants shoved together with Zs and Ws. My parents uttered quick words like ‘I miss you mom’ down toward the ground and stared resolutely into the distance.

I grew bored as children do and wandered among the headstones reading the names of my grandparents’ cemetery neighbors, I noticed that often one person in a married couple died not long after the other. It felt then like a strange phenomenon. Was it chance that the living partner suddenly got sick or had a car crash that took their life so soon after the other died? I didn’t understand that it was possible for someone to die of grief.

People still ask me how my mother died. (Which honestly feels like a wildly inappropriate and nosy question, especially to ask the deceased’s daughter, and yet it happens more often that one might think!) I bristle inside when they ask. The question hurts. They are asking me to think again about my mother’s last moments. They are shining a spotlight on my pain and poking it with a dirty pointed stick.

Since I am a now woman in my forties, I’ve reached the level of not caring how I appear to others and feel delightfully unafraid to speak my mind. When I’m asked how my mother died by someone who wants access to this private information (because if they were close enough to her or the family and deserved to know, they would already know!) I briefly revel in the feeling that if they are uncaring enough to weasel this knowledge out of me, I will give them what they ask, while making it as uncomfortable as I can.

She fell, I tell them. She hit her head on the coffee table. I describe the blood seeped into the carpet, the sheer amount if it and how the sickly sweet smell of death lingered and refused to be scrubbed from the house even by professional cleaners. I describe how I know how she tried to move from the living room to the dining room, through the kitchen and into her bedroom because of the blood trail and where she held onto the furniture to support herself.

The cleaning company sanded the finish off one dining chair’s ears where she held on with bloody hands and leaned in pain for a moment. I let them know she was found on the floor in her bedroom where she finally fell, and that the coroner took off her wedding band and left it for me on the dresser, nearly unrecognizable because the tiny inlaid diamonds were crusted with dry dark blood and stuck with several of her wispy hairs.

She lost blood. She remained on the floor for somewhere between one to three days. No one knows because she was alone. She was alone, on the floor, bleeding and dying for up to three days. She was close to the phone where she fell, but not close enough to reach it and call for help.

I often wonder what she thought about during that time. For one to three days was she conscious enough to think about me? Did she want to stay and simply didn’t have the strength to get to the phone? Or did she see the chance to make the pain of her endless grief stop and take it with relief while lying on the dark green carpet?

She was found on August 1st, but because I will never know exactly when she died, for me her death anniversary begins on July 29th and ends on the evening of August 1st. Each year I take three anniversary days to mentally be with her because I wasn’t there to hold her hand in her last dying moments.

Are those the details you wanted to know? Because it is agonizing for me to relive them, I inform my questioner. I am often met with a silent and shocked face. (Serves them right, I think.)

That answers HOW. But if you want to know WHY she died, I can easily tell you. She died of grief. She died of a broken heart. She had finally found love, and then he died. She slowly stopped eating. Her neighbor told me at the funeral that she never left the house, even for groceries, and she refused to move or sell the place. She kept up a fairly cheerful voice on the phone to her children and grandchildren hundreds of miles apart while she was slipping away.

What can make grieving a parent’s death so difficult when the parent died of grief is that we cycle through so many emotions that drain our energy. We get angry at our parent for seemingly not loving us enough to hold onto life. We can then feel guilt for being angry at our dead parent. We might berate and resent ourselves for not being enough, not calling enough, or not visiting enough. I think of all the times I looked at my phone and saw that my mom was calling but I was “too busy” to answer. We obsess about all the things we could have or should have done that would result in a different outcome, specifically the outcome of our parent not dying. But they died, our brains remind us, and maybe we get angry again because it seems so easy to see all of the reasons they should have tried harder to live.

Hindsight is brutal. What’s done is done. Long ago someone advised me that “nothing is irrevocable” when I was worried about my life choices. But this is. Death is irrevocable. We are standing on the sidelines after the game watching the instant replay, knowing what could have been done better and agonizing about it. There isn’t a second chance, and it’s easy to use our grief to hurt ourselves with this knowledge.

Once after many days of spiraling anxiety and depression, I worked myself up into enough of a panic that I was certain I’d inherited my mom’s grief, that when she died somehow it transferred to me. I imagined myself carrying her grief as well as my own. The visual imagery in my head was enough to make me crumble into a crying mess for days, the kind where silent tears simply stream from your face. I imagined that my inability to break this grief cycle was going to kill me, too, that I would end up just like my mom, unable to hang on and giving into the relief of dying to stop this unbearable pain.

Thankfully the anger in me swelled again–anger at my mom and at myself. I have two beautiful children. My mom also had two children. While I love her and grieve her and simultaneously am so mad at her for leaving me, I knew I could not let this grief break me. I will never leave those two children to carry such a weight on their shoulders.

I will swallow this grief and let it dissolve in my body. I will figure it out and pack it away. I will share it and write about it and let it hold my hand as I keep living. I am letting grief change me but I am not letting grief take me. I wish my mother would have done the same.

Most days I forgive her for letting go. Her death was the culmination of many years of hurting and struggle. It was not something I could have solved with one more phone call or visit (as much as I wish it). Her generation was taught to shove problems down and act as if everything was fine–to put on a cheerful face and say something nice. A lifetime of that building pressure would be enough to crack anyone’s smiling mask.

So much of this life is beyond our control. It was beyond my mom’s control, and it is also beyond mine. Yours, too, dear friend reading this now…the circumstances of your parent’s death were not something you could control. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know it hurts.

I don’t have the 100% solution to this heartache, though I know that continuing to hurt ourselves isn’t helping. As much as possible we need to be the loving friend to ourselves that we wanted to be to our grieving parent when they were alive. We deserve love, grace, care, and oh so much patience. I know this is hard to give ourselves. Sometimes it’s best started in small doses. I am here for you. Wherever you are today is enough. Deep breaths. Let’s keep moving forward. We’ve got this.