Life changed so drastically when my mom died. It felt like someone turned on one of those distorted selfie filters–the world looked strange, oddly sharp and then suddenly out of focus. The air felt different, with a thicker atmosphere that made it hard to move. Gravity was all wrong, as if I’d been teleported to a parallel universe where things generally looked the same, but time was running just a few seconds too slowly, off kilter enough for me to lose my emotional balance. This was the deep grief that immediately followed my mother’s death, and I didn’t think it would ever get better.

It seemed to only affect me. Most other people didn’t appear to have a problem walking on an earth that was ever so slightly tilted on the wrong axis. Oh, Toto, I’m absolutely certain we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

I spent a long time in deep grief. Time didn’t matter. Whether it was midnight, noon, or 2 am, my mind was in one of two places–either numb and stranded, empty and frozen in the place between an inhale and the relief of the exhale, or endlessly spinning and racing, running on a conveyor belt of repeating despair.

I cried buckets of tears that landed with a hiss and the stench of hot metal. I couldn’t eat. Didn’t want to sleep. Clean clothes seemed pointless. I desperately wanted to feel better, but I also wanted to wallow as low as I could go, because anything else felt like leaving my mom, as if functioning would betray her. (I couldn’t function, so no worries about betrayal.)

Such deep grief took away my biggest coping mechanism, the thing I turned to daily for comfort, mood support, and companionship. Grief took music out of my life.

Toward the end of the year in 2022 Spotify said I’d listened to 113,861 minutes of music since early spring, which was apparently more than 99% of other listeners in the United States that year. Music was my crutch, my emotional release, and the thing I reached for almost constantly to feel better about being alive or at least not painfully alone. (I also have ADHD, so music quenches a neurological thirst and soothes my brain before it spirals like a hyperactive squirrel.)

I choose music to match the mood I’m in or to shift my brain to a different mindset. Just as my mom used to in the kitchen, I listened or sang along to keep my heart happy and my ADHD brain occupied, focused, or distracted.

I would happily sing full-time as a job if there was any way I could make that work. Unfortunately singing with deep grief didn’t work. It broke my voice, and I ended up crying instead.

After my mom died, I discovered I didn’t know how to take a silent shower. I was alone with only the sound of water and the rushing sense of sadness swirling in my head. I couldn’t stand. I showered sitting down with my forehead pressed to the tile wall.

One night I got out mid-shower with shampoo still in my hair and scribbled on a scrap of paper “When will I sing in the shower again?”

I remember clearly thinking it would never happen. That thought was a massive and final judgment. Yet another loss I couldn’t sustain. By saying I would never be able to sing again I was telling myself that I would never be happy again, that I would always feel that intense level of grief, and that I would never sing again without warbling off into tears. Even when I was alone with the tiled walls and only the running water to hear me, my voice broke every time. It was too much, but it was the truth and the new circumstances to which I needed to adapt.

Or, at least it was the truth for a while.

At some point, I started singing again. Just little bits. Quietly. I can’t pinpoint when–which is annoying and frustrating because I’d love to be able to say dear friend, keep going because in exactly six months you will reach the milestone of change!

For as much as grief crashed into me like a head-on collision with a freight train, the tiny bits of comfort and normalcy trickled in like the slow leak in an attic pipe, and you don’t notice the water seeping through until you sit idly with a glass of red wine instead of doing the dishes one night and you’re staring up at your kitchen ceiling wondering where the heck did that come from?!

Just in case you don’t have anyone in your life who can tell you this right now (because I think only those of us who’ve lost someone dear to them to death can truly understand this stuff), know that it does get better. It will.

Maybe not today or next week, but still your job is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Eventually your hand will surreptitiously reach out to pick up the small pieces of happiness you put down to grieve when your mom or dad died.

Maybe you’ll weed your overgrown garden and plant flowers again. Or you dust off the guitar you stopped playing.

You might pick up a fiction novel and enjoy it instead of the stack of nonfiction self help books piling up on your nightstand that well meaning people sent you to help with grief.

Maybe you’ll bake cookies for your kids, and later when you saved some for yourself to have with a cup of tea they don’t taste like nothing anymore but are actually sweet.

Or maybe you see a tiny, beautiful little joy in the world, like a teeny bird hopping along the sidewalk, pecking contentedly at crumbs, and you realize after a few more steps that for the first time in a while, you smiled.