Life can be hell when you can’t stop thinking about death, especially the death of your mother or father. Whether their passing was sudden or whether due to an illness or other long-term condition their death was not a surprise, in many ways when it happens, we feel as if the floor has dropped out from under our feet. We are hit with the swift and sudden reality of raw grief and loss. Even if we’ve had time to prepare, there may still very much be a sense of hey, wait a minute! I wasn’t ready for this. Not yet. This is the unfinished business of grief.

For several weeks, I have been making notes and carefully crafting thoughts to write a blog post for you about music and its affect on grief. This topic touches a particularly tender place in my heart, and it was important to me to get that post right. I prepared the final edits on my writing and worked to neatly wrap up the post while my son was in his music lesson. Quite stupidly and irresponsibly, I was writing using the Google text app on my laptop, which I have since learned does not auto save. You may see where this is going–the holidays came, and my laptop battery died, taking with it my precious article. It was sucked into the void. All of my work. Gone.

It would be impossible to re-create the lost work. How can I rewrite it with the same feeling and heart contained in the original? I actually felt sick to my stomach. I lamented and whined about what to do. It crossed my mind that I would never be able to blog again. (Oh, the drama I brought upon my heart!)

In reality, it’s not as if I truly lost a magnum opus, but still, that writing took a huge chunk of my time, and as a busy mom juggling kids and life and the holidays, losing big work stinks.

I knew I’d need time for this loss to ease its throbbing sting before I could jump back into writing again about the topic of music and grief. I needed a new thought. A different direction. Something else to write about.

No good ideas came, because I was stewing over losing the music article. I couldn’t come up with anything else to write about for a grief blog because I was grieving about losing important writing about grief. (Huh? This is either super meta or confusing. There must be a lesson here.)

I had unfinished business with this topic of music and grief, and I couldn’t move on.

This is how I feel a lot of the time when I think about losing my mom. Obviously I’m not actually comparing the impact of my mother’s death to losing a couple thousand words of text, but I was absolutely experiencing a small scale example of what people experience during grief when a parent dies. Her death was sudden and unexpected. Wait. I wasn’t ready for this. Bring her back.

She and I have unfinished business. There are conversations we were supposed to have. She had plane tickets to fly to Oregon for my birthday. There should have been cake to cut and candles to blow out. She died before I could make my birthday wish. Every future birthday wish was taken away before we were ready. The floor fell out from under my feet.

With many things in 2022, with so much advanced technology, it seems that we live with quite a safety net. Computer programs auto save. We make back ups. We have pin numbers, security questions and answers, and alternate emails or phone numbers in case we get locked out of accounts. Files can be saved in the virtual trash for 30 days before they are automatically deleted. Overdraft accounts are there today to back up credit card payments and bank charges. Credit card companies refund fraudulent charges. In so many ways we are assured of landing safely if we fall.

But it’s not like that with death and dying. We cannot recover what was lost. Maybe when our mother and father dies, because we are so used to having that safety net in life, we stand there with our toes hanging over the edge of a steep drop, gazing into the void, and reaching out our arms, hoping to grasp their hands and pull them back.

In so many ways life gives us an undo button, but not in death and certainly not in grief. We may spend our time in grief angry or lamenting that in this one critically important way we cannot undo what has been done. They are gone.

We must live with that and swallow whatever unfinished business remains. This particular sunk cost is significant. The days, weeks, and even years that follow turn into the practice of living through what we thought we were promised. What we wanted to have.

Each dance recital or piano concert a grandparent cannot attend, the graduation or promotion you wanted to share with your parent who supported you, and even silly moments when something happens you would normally share– when these moments happen now you can feel so horribly cheated by what exists in your mind and heart but can never be in real life again. The unrecoverable moments. The ache of it.

For now the ghosts of my deleted future wishes still hover close around me. I can only hope that time will ease the burn. For now I’m learning to tie knots, figuring out how to create my own safety net.

I pet my cat and give chin scratches. I get my feet in the grass and breathe fresh air. Neighborhood walks help me get one foot in front of the other. We need to keep moving forward, eyes up on the horizon, into the canopy of the trees, or gazing at the stars.

Don’t look back too often. Don’t look down at the floor expecting it to fall out from beneath you. You can create your safety net! You’re not alone in this grief.

Call a friend. Meet someone for coffee. Get your feelings out, either with pen and paper in a journal or notebook or on your computer if typing coming easier. (But if you do, don’t forget to save your work!)

I’m here for you, grieving friend. Leave me a comment below to connect.