Peggy Jaeger, Author

Here’s what they don’t tell you happens when you lose your mother.

1. the grief is, at times, physically debilitating to the point you can’t move, breathing is difficult, and you lose all mental focus.

2. you will reach for the phone too many times to ask your mom something, only to realize at the last moment she is no longer around to answer your question. Same goes for when you have something fun you want to share.

3. internal anger builds like a volcano, bubbling and churning and getting hotter until it needs to release and erupts into the air, covering you and everyone around you with the ash of incapacitating emotions.

4. things you never worried about before now become looming, potentially life-altering events, so much so, the worry begins to blind you to reality.

5. you will lose sleep ruminating on everything you ever said or did to make your mom angry and wish you could take back every single word.

6. you will have entire conversations in your head about past moments – both good and bad – with your mom.

7. Foods, smells, and certain phrases will trigger you into a downward spiral of emotions.

8. the holidays are awful.

9. Mother’s Day is soul-crushing.

10. you think you’ll never feel like a normal person again, or ever be able to get your joy back.

11. the worry and dread that you will lose another loved one, suddenly and without warning, is overwhelming.

I’ve gone through every single one of these phases so far, these past 11 months…some, multiple times during a single day.

Would I have been able to deal with them better had I known they would occur? Most likely, not. Sometimes, forewarned isn’t forearmed because you simply don’t know how you are going to react to a situation until it is upon you.

Grief is a living, breathing, all-consuming entity that takes over every aspect of your life. Tack on guilt to that and you’ve got the equivalent of an emotional tsunami.

There have been so many times in the past 11 months when I’ve gone through a gamut of emotions in a single day. Hell, a single hour. Rage. Horror. Guilt. Crying jags – really ugly ones. The kind no other human should witness you go through.

I’ve been mean to people when they ask how I’m doing and I just want to scream at them, “HOW THE F**K DO YOU THINK I’M DOING??!!”

I’ve pulled out of author and book-signing events at the last minute because I knew it was going to be too much for me and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself with my unscheduled crying.

I’ve pulled away from friends because I didn’t want anyone to ask me how I was doing because…see above.

I’ve had difficulty writing my happy, love-forever stories because I just can’t find the happy in me, or on the page, some days.

I’m astute enough of a health professional to know that the best friend of grief is depression and the two hold hands more often than not when one is dealing with loss. I’m also enough of a stubborn bull Taurus to not seek help but to attempt to resolve that depression on my own.

And right now the logical part of my brain is asking, “How’s that going for ya?”

11 months… unbelievable.