Anniversary

When my mom passed away on November 4th, 2011, I thought that grieving simply meant letting go of the past and moving forward.

Before my mom passed away, she told us that she didn’t want many people at her funeral because she didn’t want anyone to know what happened, and I thought that meant I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.

The weekend my mom passed away, my two older sisters and I cleaned our house of all of her belongings, because it would be less painful for us to forget that she was ever there than to remember that she wasn’t.

For the next ten years of my life, I pretended as if my mom had never passed away, until every November 4th, I would have panic attacks and feel a dark emptiness inside of me, which were very different from the panic attacks and dark emptinesses I get from binge watching new seasons of Love is Blind. With the exception of my therapist who I’ve been seeing since 2018, I rarely spoke to anyone about it, even my family.

On November 5th, 2021, my oldest sister texted me and my middle sister that it’s been ten years, and that was the most my sisters had ever acknowledged her death to me. I remember sitting with these same post Love is Blind binge feelings, and I knew that something needed to change. I decided that I needed to do what most straight, cis men like myself typically don’t do: talk about my feelings.

For the next year, I joined an organization called The Dinner Party and hosted a monthly grief group, which is like an after-school club, except it’s all people in their 20s and 30s who talk about their dead parents. It has been an incredibly healing experience to find joy and solidarity in being part of that community, but I felt sad that I felt more comfortable sharing my experience with these strangers turned friends than I did with my family.

This year, my girlfriend suggested that I ask my sisters to go through photos of our mom together with my nephews to honor her. In typical responsible oldest sister fashion, she said yes, and in typical middle sister fashion, she didn’t respond for a week and then asked, “are we taking the kids on a candy hunt for Halloween?”

The week prior, I met with my grief group telling them I thought it would be this perfect Hallmark moment of grieving and thought that as the only person in my family who went to therapy, I’d be our group leader. I told them how excited and nervous I was, but that might have also been because we spent the hour beforehand in a Bushwick warehouse smashing VCRs and glass plates with metal baseball bats.

November 4th comes along, and I arrive at my oldest sister’s house, because in typical responsible oldest sister fashion, she owns a house in Brooklyn. And in middle sister fashion, my middle sister immediately bombards me with questions about a tech issue she’s having at work. No one mentions my mother.

For the next couple of hours, it seems like we’re doing anything possible to avoid talking about our mom - we take my nephews to the park, we doom scroll social media, we file our taxes - until my oldest sister finally takes out these bags of photo albums from our childhood, and show it to my nephews. I want to say it was a perfect moment with them, but my middle sister would not stop interrupting to ask me if I knew how to create an Excel spreadsheet with all of the bridal dress shops in the United States.

I was getting frustrated when I paused to think about what was happening: this would have been exactly the family scene as my mother would have loved to see it.

It was my middle sister asking me to solve a problem on a computer for her.

It was my oldest sister being responsible and doing what we asked of her without asking for credit.

It was me being my most childlike self with the children.

And what was the most perfect moment was when my nephew pointed to a photo of my mom and called her, “ah pau,” which is the Chinese word for “grandma,” despite having never met her.

This year, I had to learn that grief isn’t simply letting go and moving forward, but grief doesn’t look the same for everyone.

Grief might look like turning to someone for help but not knowing the right way to ask for it.

Grief might look like making sure your kids carry on the stories for the people who can’t be there to tell them themselves.

For me, grief looked like smashing plates and VCRs, explaining to my four year-old nephew how his mom and I are related, and being who our mom raised us to be.