The day your loved one died is likely etched into your memory. Some details may be utterly clear even though the loss was many years ago. You might have been just about to eat a meal at home. Or the phone rang with the news in the middle of the night. You may have been sitting beside your loved one in the hospital after a prolonged illness. For each of us, the point at which our grief story begins is different and unique, though we have a lot in common. A piece of our heart is missing.

When my mother’s husband died, it was an average day. A warm breeze, blue sky, scrambled eggs for breakfast day, and then everything changed. After this breakfast, he turned pale. He had trouble breathing. And then the chest pain began. My mother gave him an aspirin and called 911. The ambulance came on the country roads, past cornfields and vineyards. Not fast enough, but she didn’t know that then. She packed him clean underwear and fresh, comfortable clothes, expecting the uncomfortable recovery and days of bland hospital meals on covered plastic trays. He never liked spicy food anyway, but it wouldn’t be like their suppers at home together. “Just come sit by me,” he’d often say after a meal from his spot on the big sofa as he flipped through the channels looking for a movie to watch. He would say, “It was a long day today,” and take her hand in his.

She texted me after she called 911 to say she was leaving for the hospital, to follow the ambulance because they wouldn’t let her ride along. He was still alive in the ambulance. Those precious minutes.

My phone rang just a few hours later. I was so relieved when I answered and heard her soft, familiar laugh. He had recently bought her first smart phone for Mother’s Day, after she left her faithful, old flip phone on the hood of the car and driven off. She had called me accidentally. I heard the background noise for several seconds before she laughed. The laugh brought me a wave of relief. He must be okay.

“Momma?”

“Mom, it’s me. I’m here. Can you hear me?”

After several seconds of silence, enough for a long breath in and time to hold it before letting it out slowly, I heard the sound again. It was not the laughter of relief or the wonderful agony of knowing the loved one will be okay after something horrible has happened. It was a long, drawn out sob. A moaning cry of grief so deep that it lingered, and continued, and seemed endless. It was a sound of tremendous pain and disbelief. I stayed on the line, listening to my mother wail and to the mumble of the doctor in the background. I heard the doctor tell her that his heart just didn’t make it through the procedure. They tried to look with a tiny camera. They tried to save him.

I will never forget that sound–the sound of my mother’s grief. Several minutes went by and she just couldn’t stop. I sat on my kitchen step stool, one hand holding my phone, the other stuck to my heart, three time zones away, unable to do anything to help or make this not be happening, while my children played with Lego in the living room. The sound of their chatter filled one ear, while the sound of her despair and disbelief filled the other.

“Do you want me to help you call someone?” a woman’s voice in the background asked her. My mother mumbled something incoherent, and the phone shuffled. Her breath came louder and closer to me.

“Mom, I’m here. I’m here.” I repeated, because in that moment there was nothing else I could say.

“He’s gone.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “He’s gone.”

My mother died just over a year later in 2018, but the day everything changed, the day my own grief story began, was when her husband died. His death set events in motion. It created the grief that consumed and ultimately killed my mother, who couldn’t bear a world without him. My grief story continues still. People with kind intentions talked to me about the stages of grief, as if someday I would be over it, that I would eventually move on, as if I would someday neatly close, seal, and put away the box containing my grief. I’ve learned, at least for me, that my grief story will always be a part of me. Losing my mother changed me. It aged me. It altered the fabric of my being. There is no going back.

My grief story has changed and grown and continues to change and grow with each passing year, and it may be the same for you, too. Grief has no destination. You just keep walking, and sometimes the scenery changes. I would love to hear from you if you are on your own grief journey. Where and when did your story begin?

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