When Death Reminds Us To Live; A Mother Reflecting on Grief

This is my attempt to move with the emotions alive inside me right now, as a Mother and as a human who feels deeply. This is not necessarily meant to comfort, because I am not sure death is something meant to be comforting, but what I can offer is the honesty and raw contemplations of being inside it, the knowing that when these emotions move through you, you are not alone.

Last night, (2/16), I read an article about a 14-year-old killed in a car accident, and tears welled up immediately. My daughter is 15, and without effort, my mind went straight to her, feeling gratitude that it was not her, gratitude that it was not one of her friends, one of those quiet moments where you recognize how fragile life is, but you continue on, because it didn't directly effect you. My daughter and I had a wonderful walk enjoying the abnormally warm weather for our area- and had one of our very lengthy conversations about life, love, human behaviors, fear of death etc....- pretty typical conversation for us. Living our life, while another's life was drastically different.

The following morning, we found out the 14 YO was one of my daughter's best friends.

The disbelief that moved through me was immediate, followed by despair, followed by a helplessness that I didnt know how to work with. My heart breaking for my daughter, for the family, for the friends whose lives have now split into before and after, and for the Mother, the Father, the siblings, the mind trying to step into their reality and yet knowing it cannot truly comprehend the terrain they now walk. The life of all of possibilities, the plans and dreams of someone so young- the high-school dance this weekend- its not just a person we grieve- but the hope for the life with them in our orbit. The instant overwhelm of emotions and thoughts, all in attempt to comprehend such a tragic happening- but there is no way to bargain with death- it's something that must be felt through- as an adult it is difficult, but for a child its far more complex for the body to process.

This is every parent’s worst fear, to loose a child and to remain here living while the person you loved, protected, and imagined into your future is suddenly gone, grieving belonging to the living, to those left behind to carry both the love and the absence in the same breath. So to have this hit close to home stirs up these fears, while simultaneously washing you with immense gratitude for your children that are right in front of you- in these moments, it defies the human experience, flooding you with the full spectrum of emotions and thoughts.

As parents, we raise our children with an instinct to protect them from the weight of the world, from pain, from the sharp edges of loss, from emotions that feel too big for their bodies to hold. We try to give them what we did not have, or preserve what we did, to shape an environment where they can feel safe enough to grow, while knowing deep inside that safety has its limits, because the only constant life ever offers, is change.

When our child hurts, something inside us hurts with them. Its a different level of turmoil Their pain does not exist separate from us, it moves through us, often reflecting the pain of our past that we have not met yet. Awakening memories of our own grief, losses, and moments when we felt powerless. By nature, there is a longing to take it from them, to somehow absorb it so they do not have to feel it so deeply.

And yet we cannot.

We cannot remove the experience that is shaping them, or walk through it in their place. We can only remain beside them, holding space as they move through emotions that have no instruction manual, allowing them to express in the ways their body and heart know how.

This can leave us feeling helpless, because we understand pain, we recognize the absence of language that it can hold, and we know there is no shortcut through it, no way around it, only the quiet act of being present as they learn to carry what has suddenly been placed in their lives

For me, part of my parenting has been about breaking the chains of generational trauma, a lineage shaped by grief and the absence of tools in how to handle it and no how to remain connected to oneself in its presence. I am no stranger to death, it has been a companion in my life for as long as I can remember, arriving early in my life and repeating often, shaping the way I saw the world and my place within it.

Meeting death for the first time was when I was five years old, when my uncle ended his life while living with schizophrenia, and at that age, before I could comprehend a language to express the experience for myself, something inside me began asking questions about life, suffering, and what exists beyond this physical experience. Not long after, my mom’s boyfriend died, and then my grandma, who had been my rock, my constant sense of stability in a world that already felt uncertain. Then my other grandparents, who had also helped raise me, and then as I grew into my teens and young adulthood- friends started to pass in tragic ways. It seemed that the story of living was me, merely moving through the next experience of loss.

With each passing, I felt an unraveling inside me, a sense of isolation that is difficult to describe, the feeling that while the world continued moving forward for everyone else, something inside my own timeline had stopped. There was a loneliness in carrying that much loss, a feeling of separation from the living, I felt not many people could relate to this, at my age.

An unexpected pattern began emerging, when others began experiencing death in their own lives, I felt a pull to be there with them, to be present in a way that only someone who has walked through that terrain can. Grief had shaped me, and in shaping me, it had also given me the ability to remain with others inside their own unraveling, to understand the language of loss without needing it to be explained. To hold the wide range of the messiness in this existence, without fixing, just being there honoring whatever shows up.

And while some may see this as heavy, or depressing, death has given me the ability to live.

Not immediately though- at the time, I wanted to die with each of them. I felt anger at being the one who remained, jealousy toward those who no longer had to carry the weight of being here, and a thread of survivor’s guilt that followed me through my early years. "Why me?Why am I still here?" I cursed the heavens and whatever existed beyond them, cursed the silence that never responded, yearning for an explanation that simply didn't exist, I was left alone with emotions so strong they had nowhere to go.

Pain was the only language I knew how to speak, and so I expressed pain through pain. It led me down roads of self destruction, because I did not know how to hold what I was already carrying. As I grew older, the more I tried to avoid grief, vulnerability, and run from the awareness of how fragile life truly is, the deeper and darker those unexpressed places became. They layered on top of each other, shaping my inner world, the places I thought I was outrunning never actually leaving, only waiting for me to turn and face them.

There is something deeply human in our instinct to move away from hurt, to distract ourselves from what feels unbearable, and yet what I have come to understand is that what we avoid does not dissolve, it gets buried. It lives in the nervous system, our body, and in our subconscious, quietly influencing how we relate to ourselves and to life.

Those experiences forged me. Not that I would have ever "chose", but I recognize the role they had in creating the life I have today, which I am incredibly thankful for- And now, as I sit beside my daughter in her grief, I see this differently. I see that my pain was not in vain, not because pain itself is meaningful, but because of who i have become, through this pain.

In trying to comfort her, I am aware of the delicate balance between presence and projection. She is emotionally aware in ways I was not at her age, and still, there are no words that can fully explain why tragedy occurs, no perspective that can remove the weight of loss. I recognize that my desire to offer deeper meaning, to frame pain as something that can be transmuted, comes from my own lived experience, and yet her grief is her own. My role is not to give her answers, but to sit beside her in the questions, to allow her to feel what she feels, without needing it to become anything other than what it is.

And so I find myself here, not at the center of this loss, and yet deeply within its orbit, an observer to something no parent ever wants their child to face. While I may be comfortable speaking about death, acknowledging its presence without turning away, I know that many are not. I find myself wondering how many people will make it all the way through these words, because to truly sit with death is to sit with the reflection of our own impermanence.

It interrupts the quiet plans we make with ourselves, the unconscious belief that tomorrow will arrive as expected, that the people we love will continue walking beside us, that life will unfold according to the patterns we have come to rely on. We build our days through small, repetitive habits that create the feeling of continuity, the sense that we are participating in something stable, something predictable, and over time those days become weeks, and months, and years.

And yet underneath this all, is the consistent truth, that change is the only permanence- the unknown is actually the space in which we live in, whether or not we acknowledge this.

We move through life with the illusion of control, because it allows us to function, to plan, to dream, to invest ourselves in a future we cannot guarantee. We understand this cognitively, we can say the words, we can acknowledge the fragility of life in passing, and yet, there is a difference between knowing it intellectually and feeling it viscerally, feeling the way loss rearranges the internal landscape in an instant or the way it dissolves the illusion of permanence and replacing it with something far more honest.

We are not meant to live in fear of this truth, I see it as an an invitation to live in awareness of it, to recognize the sacredness of what is here now, as something we are briefly entrusted to experience.

I find myself wondering if maybe death is here to reveal something about life that we cannot see any other way, reflecting the fragile and fleeting nature of every moment we are given.

Maybe it is here to show us how deeply we are capable of loving, how every person we meet is not exempt from this human condition.

There is something about loss that strips away the illusion of endless time, that brings us into direct contact with what is here now. The way we hold someone’s hand, the way we listen, or say goodbye. Death has a way of illuminating life, of sharpening our awareness, of inviting us to feel in ways we may have unconsciously avoided.

Maybe it allows us to love without holding back or allows us to breathe more fully, to recognize the miracle of breath itself, something so constant we forget it is a gift.

Maybe death does not exist only as an ending, but a teacher, wildly reminding us that being here, in this body, in this moment, surrounded by the people we love, is far more sacred than we often realize while we are inside of it.

And still, it hurts. And it is meant to.

This "knowing" does not ease the tragedy of a 14-year-old life lost, and nor, does it try to. It is here to honor the reality that life is brief, that everything we love exists within a fragile window, and that sometimes it takes loss to bring us back into the truth of what is here.

Tonight, I will hold my daughter a little longer, aware of something I have always known, and felt more deeply now than ever before, that being here, loving each other in the current now, is the only thing we were ever promised.

I love you all- Hold your people tight

Elaine