One year later...

... and we are still reeling.

For all that today meant to me and family, it was a relatively normal day. For those of you who don't know a year ago on September 20th my mom passed away suddenly from congestive heart failure. So, this weekend I came home from college to visit. I brought my friend Lauren with me because I knew that it would be a rough weekend without the distraction, I needed to get homework done, and I just genuinely love Lauren's company. I have thought about mama all day but I have not dwelt on the bad which is so great. Though, Wednesday night I did have a nightmare, where basically I was reliving that week over again from her death to her funeral.

So where is my grief after a year? There are five stages to loss and grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
What I have learned in a year is that these stages come and go and you may not experience them in this order or even all of them. However, over the course of the year I have, for the most part, experienced all five stages. I know I experienced all five within the six days that her death and funeral occurred. Since then I have experienced them again.

The first stage I experienced was DENIAL. When I was told my mom was dead, my first reaction was, "NO! NO! NO!" I literally screamed these words along with, "She was my best friend!" Denial is a normal reaction to rationalize overwhelming emotions. It is a way of dealing with the shock. Denial, for me, lasted for the five minutes I was crying into Heather's hug and possibly part of the drive back home (I was at college at the time).

ANGER came pretty fast and left fairly quickly as well. I was angry that whole weekend and occasionally, even now, I experience spurts of anger. What got me through it though? It's simple, God. A lot of people ask why does God lets bad things happen to good people. I think St. Basil answers this well in his writing On The Human Condition, "evil is a privation of good." Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of good. Think of it as a constant line; God is the absolute good at one end and the more we pervert that goodness as human beings the further away man comes away from God on the other end. Basil puts it like this, "the soul is made evil through a perversion of what is according to nature." God is not the author of evil, we as human beings pervert the goodness He is and to put it simply, bad things happen.

The next stage, BARGAINING, was something I held onto for a while and still contemplate. It wasn't so much that I was trying to make a deal with God, because my mom was already gone and I knew I couldn't get her back. However, I was looking for some control. I was asking the what if questions. What iF I had been there with her? What if she hadn't been so stubborn and called the ambulance earlier? This one for me is still the hardest to overcome, but I try my best everyday to look past the what ifs. Again I turn to the Bible. There are so many verses that tell me there is reason, what ifs are not the right questions to be asking, and all that happens is for the good. My favorite verse to look to during my sadness or any struggle really is Romans 8:28. This verse says, " and we know that for those that love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose."

DEPRESSION may be one of the hardest stages to go through. You become extremely aware of the reality of death. Some are so aware they say, "What is the point if I am going to die anyways?" or, " I miss my loved one, why go on?" Much of my time depressed was sitting alone in my room crying and grieving. It is important to go through this process. Feeling all of these emotions shows that you have begun to accept the situation.

This brings me to ACCEPTANCE, the last stage. This is where I began to realize that it was going to be okay, there was nothing I could do about it, and I might as well get on with my life. Because most of all my mom would be extremely upset if I could not get past my grief for her loss. I know at one point I thought about quitting school to be with and help my family. My uncles convinced me otherwise and the main reasoning they gave me was that my mom would have not wanted that at all. She did not spend her life putting me through school and teaching me to value knowledge and growth just for me to throw it away. I now can honestly say I have accepted what has happened but that does not mean that I am free from or have not experienced these stages again. It comes at you like a wrecking ball sometimes and knocks you to the ground but you now know how and can get back up.

I wanted to write about grief on the one year passing of my mom in order to fully let go of all these thoughts and hopefully help anyone who is or has or may go through what I am going through. I hope that you can read this and see a first person perspective and you can know and understand that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

With that said I want to leave you with a few words from my favorite song (it gets me through the hard times and puts a smile on my face).

xo Brittany