By Deborah Blackwell

After my mother’s long, exhausting, and tumultuous years of life-and-death illness, she finally entered hospice last August. She hung on … and on … until five months ago, when she experienced a dramatic, life-ending event that mirrored her life’s chaos. This forced me to step away from my own life to address this intense situation, all while trying to deal with my son’s now-cured cancer, my then-jeopardized job, a fragile world order, and exhaustion from years of debilitating Long Covid. 

Life, during my mother’s awful ordeal and afterward, felt like an overwhelming, unsustainable tangle of what-the-f*ckness invading every minute of each 24-hour day. Everything I believed I had control over unraveled, leaving me with an engulfing, fuzzy feeling I came to call Mystical Grief.

But what exactly is Mystical Grief?

I thought I could sort it out with the free grief support hospice offers for 13 months after a loved one passes. Note: She wasn’t my loved one; she was my mother. I could write my own book with Jennette McCurdy’s title, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” Sorry, not sorry. My mother was abusive, and my life with her was traumatic. When she died, I thought I would feel better, but instead, I just felt sad that she had left everything unresolved. No apologies, no reconciliation — just shocking, horrible skeletons in her closet that sprang out on us every time Sir Husband and I were cleaning her house. These tragic skeletons deepened the mystery of her and my life with her. And by default, added wrinkles to my Mystical Grief — this confusing, multilayered, unsettling, uncomfortable entity that hovers in, around, and over me, asking for a lot. Hey, you, pay attention. And good luck figuring me out.

That blob of what-the-f*ckness didn’t go away when she died either, as I had hoped. It just compounded a bigger question: What’s the meaning of life? Seriously? What? 

As I stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out my empty Fage zero percent milkfat plain yogurt container this morning, I wondered, “Is this the meaning of life? Rinsing out an empty container? Be mindful, Deb. In a monastery, you’d be cleaning the bathroom floor with a toothbrush. This is definitely better.”

I don’t even like plain yogurt, but a few years ago, my nutritionist told me it was the best way to start the day, and I’ve been doing it every day since. It’s a habit — a core part of my morning routine — just like the daily calls, drama, and demands of my mother until the day she died. 

So, if I can figure out the meaning of life while rinsing out a yogurt container, then I’m on track, right?

Nope. Nothing about the meaning of life has been more complicated to clarify after this confusing, chaotic, and exhausting past year. Mystical grief compounded it, and navigating each day has often felt like driving a bus without wheels. But as the weeks and months go by, and the havoc turns toward recovery, my anger has shifted into hurt. Deep, profound hurt, now amplified by a sibling, a mirror image of my mother. The chosen one in charge of her estate has taken over where she left off, and the sadness that has sprung from this lifetime’s family of origin can often feel overwhelming.

The lovely hospice social worker helps. Basically, I get to unload all my upset into my webcam, and she shares a nugget of wisdom in each of our Grief 101 therapy sessions. Her medical team knew about my mother; they saw right through her fake “sweet old lady” manipulation and validated what I had been begging people to notice my whole life.

It’s human to need refuge, or sanctuary. And we look for it from others, from our surroundings, from self-help books, from therapy sessions, or even by doom-scrolling. We look for ways to avoid or escape dealing with the ickiness in our lives, our pain, our suffering. Suffering makes us feel deserving of, or entitled to, all kinds of things — revenge, retribution, answers — but mostly, I think, it’s relief. We want relief.

And last week, I realized that nobody and nothing can truly fix this or provide relief for me, except me. I need to learn how to live from my heart, not from my hurt.

Grief IS mystical. It’s complex. Scary even. And it multiplies, layer after layer of unprocessed emotions that we didn’t even realize were in there, reveal themselves like an unsupervised archaeological dig.

But this beautiful nugget from the social worker was a game-changer: “Place your love where it needs to be.”

I’m learning to do that — bring heart energy, lovingness, softness, ease, to whatever, whomever, wherever. Relief is not in resistance. It’s in learning how to live inside the mystery of life, alongside Mystical Grief. And for me, for now, that means everything.