It has only been 26 days since my mother passed. And yesterday, I sat at my sister’s baby shower.
Those two sentences should not be able to exist in the same breath. But grief does not wait for convenient timing. It does not step aside for balloons or flower arrangements or the sound of people laughing in a room. It sits right there with you, heavy and present, even when your face is smiling.
Yesterday was beautiful. My sister glowed. She held red roses against her belly, and she was radiant in every way that new life makes a person radiant. We are celebrating L’Aw, her son, who will arrive in June, a boy coming into a family still learning how to hold itself together. And there was real joy in that room. I felt it. I want to be clear about that.
But grief is not something you leave at the door. It is not the opposite of joy. Somehow, the two were layered inside each other all afternoon, the way loss and love have always been layered inside each other, because you cannot grieve what you did not deeply love.
My mother should have been there. She would have been the loudest one in the room. She would have touched my sister’s belly and made some declaration that only she could get away with. She would have been impossible and irreplaceable and entirely herself. And her absence was its own kind of presence — the chair no one sat in, the voice missing from the noise.
I do not know how to do this gracefully. I do not think there is a graceful way. I think you just keep showing up, for your sister, for the baby who does not yet know the world he is entering, for yourself, and you let joy and grief share the same space without demanding that one of them leave.
26 days. A baby is coming in June. A mother gone in April.
We carry all of it.
If you are holding grief alongside something beautiful right now, I see you.
— with love, xoeko 🖤
Comments ()