The Space She Left.

On Grief, Growth, & Learning to Live in the After

There’s a moment (and if you’ve lost someone, you’ll know exactly the one I mean) where you’re doing something completely ordinary. Making a cup of tea and pre-heating the cup just the way she liked it.

And then it hits you. Not gently. It never hits gently.

She’s gone.

My Mum died recently. Eighty-eight years, and still... still... I wasn’t ready. I’m not sure we’re ever ready, no matter how many years we get.

And now this coming weekend is Mother’s Day.

Just let that land for a moment. Because I know I’m not the only one facing it. The first one without her. The lunch I won’t be making, the flowers & gift I won’t be wrapping. Mother’s Day, that most well-intentioned of occasions, arriving just weeks after she left, like a guest who didn’t get the memo.

I have been thinking about what to do with it. How to hold a day that was built around her, now that she isn’t here to receive it. I don’t have a tidy answer yet. But I think I’ll go outside early, find a quiet patch of morning, and look for her in the light. Because that, I’ve learned, is where she tends to show up now. More on that later.

I’m writing this because I think grief is one of the most profoundly human experiences we share, and yet we talk about it in the most sanitised, careful, almost apologetic way. We say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ (what a strange phrase, as if she were an object that has been lost), and then we go quiet, because grief makes us uncomfortable. We don’t quite know where to put it.

Well, I’m putting it here. All of it. The darker parts and the unexpected parts and the parts that have quietly, slowly, begun to feel like grace.

And if you’re also facing this weekend without your mum, I hope something in these words finds you and holds you. You are not alone in this.

The First Wave: The Surreal

The very first phase of grief after Mum died was not sadness.

The first phase was surreal. Almost dissociative. You float. You function (sometimes remarkably well, which comes with its own guilt) and underneath the functioning is this low, strange hum, like a frequency you can feel but not quite hear. A detachment from the world gets you through.

In the immediate days after Mum died, I was busy. There are so many things to organise when someone dies. Funeral. Photos. Order of Service. Celebration of Life. You are useful, and being useful is a mercy, because being useful means you don’t have to sit still long enough for it to land.

The surreal phase isn’t grief yet. It’s the body’s kindness to itself, a slow release rather than a flood. It won’t last, but it’s not supposed to. Let it be what it is.

The Wave Before the Wave: Grieving Someone Who Is Still Here

There’s a particular kind of grief that doesn’t get talked about enough, and that is the grief that comes before the death. The grief of watching someone you love disappear slowly, in increments, while they are still sitting right in front of you.

Mum had dementia in her final years. And if you’ve walked that road with someone, you already know what I’m about to say. If you haven’t, I want you to understand something: it is one of the most disorienting, heartbreaking, complicated experiences a person can go through. Because you are grieving someone who is still alive. You are mourning someone who is still in the room.

The decline was both rapid and achingly slow at the same time. How is that possible? I still don’t fully understand it. There were stretches where she seemed to plateau, where we could catch our breath, and then suddenly, without warning, another piece of her would slip. A memory gone. A word she couldn’t reach. A moment where she looked at me and I could see her searching, working so hard to find me behind her eyes.

She was still there. And she wasn’t.

I had already started grieving her years before she died, and nobody had a name for that. There’s something called anticipatory grief, which sounds very clinical and tidy for something that is neither of those things. It’s the particular anguish of loving someone through their leaving while they are still present. Of driving home after a visit with tears streaming down your face, unsure if you will see her again. Of celebrating small moments of clarity with a joy so fierce it hurt, because you knew it was borrowed time.

And then when she did die, there was this strange, shameful, very human thing that happened: relief. Not because I wanted her gone. Never that. But because she was no longer lost inside herself. Because the search was over. Because she was free of it.

That relief came wrapped in its own guilt, because grief is nothing if not thorough in finding new ways to make you feel like you’re doing it wrong.

Here is what I want to say to anyone who has loved someone through dementia: you did not lose them twice. You loved them twice. In two different ways, through two different kinds of hard. That is not weakness. That is an extraordinary act of devotion.

And I learned a lot more about devotion too, in witnessing the 24/7 care my Dad gave my Mum in those final years. It was the kind of love that doesn’t announce itself or ask for recognition, the kind that simply shows up, day after day, in the small and unglamorous and relentless work of caring for someone you have loved your whole adult life. It was humbling to witness. It cracked something open in me about what love actually looks like when it is tested all the way down to the bone. A raw, valiant & graceful love… moved me to the core.

The Second Wave: The Anger Nobody Warns You About

Can we talk about the anger? Because nobody really wants to talk about the anger.

We know about sadness. Sadness is acceptable, expected, practically required. But anger, hot, bewildering, sometimes almost embarrassing anger… that one catches you off guard.

I was angry that we lived so far away from each other, and that I was not able to see her as much as I would have liked over the last decade. And then I was angry at myself for the visits that got pushed back, the times I didn’t call, or was too caught up in bringing up my own family to be fully present in Mum’s life.

Grief has a way of turning regret into a sport, and you will always, always find something to be sorry for if you look hard enough.

The anger is normal. It is grief’s ferocity. It is love with nowhere to go.

The Third Wave: The Loneliness That Doesn’t Have a Name

There’s a specific loneliness that comes with losing a parent, and it’s different from ordinary loneliness. It’s structural. It changes the shape of things.

There’s the family dynamic that shifts, quietly but seismically, when the matriarch leaves.

I have found myself in an unfamiliar position: the eldest, the only daughter, navigating a new family structure. Dad and my two brothers, three men. At times I have felt like the 4th wheel on a tricycle. I knew my position from within the pentagram of our family of five, but now I feel lost in the square that shape-shifts into a triangle.

I have found myself standing just slightly outside the squaring of the circle, pressing my nose against the glass. There is a particular loneliness in being the only daughter, the only direct surviving woman. I want to name it, because I think so many of us carry it in silence.

However, I am envisioning a new family constellation, a new dynamic, a new family sacred geometry that will emerge with time. That will emerge through Love.

The Circular Part: Why Grief Keeps Coming Back

I can most certainly attest to this personally, grief isn’t linear. Those five stages you might have heard of (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) were never meant to be a neat, sequential checklist. They are a jumble. A spiral. A loop-de-loop.

You will think you’re fine. You will have a run of good days where you feel almost like yourself, where her passing has settled into something you can carry rather than something that’s carrying you.

And then Mothers Day descends upon you.
And the calendar displays Mum’s birthday coming up in July.
Or a random Tuesday when you smell her body lotion and find yourself curled up in a ball of tears.

This is not regression. This is not you ‘not coping‘. This is grief being exactly what it is: a love story with no ending.

I’ve come to think of grief less like a wound that heals and more like a river that changes course. In the early days, it is fast and loud and it takes up all the available space. Over time, not quickly, not linearly, it becomes something you can wade in rather than something that sweeps you away. But it never entirely dries up.

And actually? I’ve started to make a kind of peace with that. Because the moments the grief returns are almost always the moments I feel her most vividly. The ache and the love are the same thing. You cannot have one without the other.

I would not trade the ache if it meant trading the love.

The Gift You Never Asked For: What Grief Has Opened in Me

I am not sure I am ready to write this part. But it feels dishonest not give it a try.

Grief has changed me. Not in the sentimental, bumper-sticker way… ‘what doesn’t kill you, etc…‘ kinda way. But in a quieter, more fundamental way.

It has made me more present. When you have watched someone you love leave this world, held their hand as they have taken their last breath, the smallness of small things becomes both more obvious and less tolerable. I am quicker now to say the thing. Say I love you. To send the message. To sit a little longer in the morning Sun over my coffee before starting my work day. She left, and I was left with a very clear sense that none of this is promised.

It has made me more honest with myself. There’s something about confronting the end of someone else’s life that makes you look more honestly at your own. To quote Neale Donald Walsh, am I living ‘the greatest version of the grandest vision I ever held about who I am’?

I am ruminating deeply on this question at the moment.
Grief holds a mirror, and it doesn’t flatter, but it clarifies.

It has cracked my heart open in a way I can only describe as useful. I have more compassion now. For other people’s grief… I see it everywhere now that I speak its language. But also for human fragility in general. For the way we all carry more than is visible. For the extraordinary ordinary effort of simply being alive.

And it has brought me, in unexpected moments, a deep and trembling gratitude for the eighty-eight years I did have with her. For the fact that I had a Mum worth grieving this hard. Not everyone is so lucky. Some people grieve the mother they never had, the love they never received, the relationship that was always complicated and now will never be repaired. I grieve a woman who led a hard life in so many respects, yet still managed to love with all her Heart. That is an enormous gift.

But of course, Mum has not entirely left.

This morning as I walked the path to the beach, dew-drops from over-hanging She Oaks brushed the crown of my head. And I felt her. Not as memory. Not as wishful thinking. As presence. As something that moved through the air and the light and the ancient trees, the intelligence of water and landed, unmistakably, on me.

The sun was rising. And in that moment, in the way you simply know things… that her Soul is eternal. That she is not gone from the world. She has simply become more of it. She is in the morning light now. In the dew. In the flowers and trees. In the particular quality of stillness just before the day fully begins. She is in all things, and if I go quietly enough, I can find her there.

I know this will not be everyone’s experience of grief. I share it not to prescribe, but because it was real, and because it changed something in me fundamentally.

And then there is the other thing. The fiercer thing.

Grief, it turns out, does not only soften you. It also fortifies you. There is a strength that has come alive in me since Mum died that I can only describe as a warrioress waking up. As if she herself surges through me now, as a force rather than simply a memory, filling the space where fear used to live.

I find that very little frightens me the way it once did. Problems that would have levelled me, situations I would once have crumpled in front of, they look different now. More navigable. There is something in me that has been tested by the hardest thing, and found that I did not break, so it stands a little taller now and says: bring life on.

Darkness, difficulty, the hard conversations, the walls that look insurmountable, I face them differently now. Not recklessly. But with a rooted, quiet knowing that Mum surges through me now, bone-deep and fierce.

I think this is what love does when it can no longer be expressed in the ordinary ways. It becomes backbone. It becomes courage. It becomes the unwavering voice that says: you can do this. You have always been able to do this. And I am right here.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

A Note to Anyone Who Is in It Right Now

If you’re reading this from the thick of it, from the surreal fog, or the unexpected fury, or during the early hours when grief comes calling and there’s no one awake to call, let me share something with you…

You are not doing it wrong. There is no wrong.

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a weakness to be pushed through. It is the natural consequence of having loved someone, and it deserves the same tenderness you would give any wound.

Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the people around you, even when they disappoint you, even when their grief looks nothing like yours. Be willing to ask for help. Be willing to let people show up, even imperfectly, even in ways that feel slightly beside the point. They are trying.

And know that on the other side of the hardest parts, not the far side, not where the grief ends because it doesn’t end, but on the other side of the worst of it, there is something waiting. A version of yourself that is softer and stronger in equal measure. A capacity for love and presence you perhaps didn’t know you had. A different relationship with what matters.

Grief can be agonising, but grief is also a teacher.
And both of those things can be true at the same time.

The Part I’m Still Learning

I won’t pretend. I’m not through it, far from it. But then again I don’t think through it is even the destination. There is no destination.

When I call home, the name in my phone address books says ‘Mum & Dad’. And its not any easier during the call when I feel the shape of her absence on the other end of the line. Still learning how to be the daughter in a family that no longer has its Mum at the centre.

I am still untangling the grief I held from before she died from the grief I’m doing now. They are different griefs, different textures, and some days they blur together and some days they are very distinct. The long, slow loss of dementia taught me a particular patience I didn’t know I had. The actual death taught me a different kind of surrender. I am still sitting with both.

I am still learning to let myself be sad without making it smaller or neater or more palatable for the people around me. And I am now learning how to be a mother to my own daughter, differently, because of all of this.

My darling girl was there in the last weeks of Mum’s life. She took shifts. She sat with her grandmother, held her hand, showed up in ways that made my heart simultaneously break and swell with a love that I don’t have adequate words to explain. She witnessed death up close, the real kind, the slow and tender and unglamorous kind, and she did not look away. I watched my girl become something more in those weeks, and I will never forget it. She became a Woman.

I have so much more to say on this topic, but no words at present… as I am really only dancing on the edges of this new found shift in our mother-daughter relationship.

But what I can say right now is the importance of never leaving things unsaid to loved ones on the basis that there will always be more time, because, as I have learned, in the sharpest possible way, that there is not always more time.

I am still learning ‘The Sacred Bloom‘ of this new life chapter. Sharing my life with Mum in new & evolving ways. Finding her in flowers, in the dew of She Oak leaves, in the particular slant of early morning light before the world gets noisy. Her voice is loud & clear when I go quiet enough to notice. And she shows up in me, in the strength I didn’t know I had until I needed it, in the courage that rises when things get dark, in the part of me that does not flinch anymore.

She is still my Mum. That didn’t stop when she died.

Her soul is eternal. And she is in all things. And she is in me.

It just changed shape. Like grief does. Like love does.

Like we do, if we’re brave enough to let it.

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Thank you for reading this. I have been quiet of late here on Substack, life has called me elsewhere. However, I am slowing making my way back to a new & luminous flow… and I look forward to sharing with you all more regularly very soon.

If this piece found you at a moment when you needed it, I’m so glad. Grief is less lonely when we say it out loud. I’d love to know, gently, whenever you’re ready, what grief has taught you. Drop your sharings in the comments, or just hold it close. Both are okay.

All my Love, xx Simone