Re-Membering Joy:

Finding Community in Grief

Your twenties are known as a time for self-discovery. A time to experiment with different career paths, friendships, cities, and to see what sticks. To learn what makes you feel grounded in your life and how to take care of yourself. To grieve in your twenties is to learn who you are in the wake of loss while trying to learn who you are at all. I lost my mom when I was 15 years old. At 20, I lost my dad. The deaths of my parents both devastated me, but the death of my father spurred a grief unlike anything else.   

I was in high school when my mom died, and I wasn’t close with anyone who had also lost a parent, let alone anyone who knew how to talk about it. While my teachers and peers were sympathetic, I subconsciously pushed my grief to the side, believing it necessary in order to get by. I didn’t talk much about her and my feelings even less, but would burst with grief every year on her birthday and the anniversary of her death in the privacy of my room or in my car by her gravesite, the cellophane from the grocery store flowers crinkling in my lap.   

No one knew me when I got to college, and that meant no one knew her. In the first few months of freshman year, I found myself in an endless cycle of the same conversation with new people, all leading one way or another to the topic of parents. At first, I was reluctant to say anything about her death for fear of scaring away potential friends, but quickly became resentful of my own silence. I realized I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to remember her, to keep her with me, to introduce her to my new friends. Talking about my mom didn’t scare anyone away. Instead, it brought us closer and I even became friends with people who’d experienced similar losses. Getting to know each other meant getting to know each other’s parents. We’d tell stories and exchange details of their passions, quirks, what once embarrassed us that we now admired. We knew the loneliness of loss and found that we could hold it together.  

When my dad died five years later during my junior year of college, I let the magnitude of his loss wash over me. I located and named all of the other losses that his entailed: his family history, memories of my mother, memories of my childhood, parts of him I hadn’t gotten to know yet, our adult relationship, and I let the grief pour on. I grieved the death of my mother all over again on top of his, this time with more acute awareness of exactly what I lost.  

Turning inward, I withdrew from the world around me. I did exactly what I needed to do to get by in school, nothing more, nothing less, and that took all of my energy. I saw friends and went out on the weekends, but rarely did I feel present where I was; rather, I felt like a shell of a person, watching my body walk me through the life I could be living if I wasn’t so deep in my own grief. I could not be both attentive to lectures and to my grief. I could not have fun at a party when all I had to say was how heartbroken I was that my dad died. And that wasn’t fun for anyone else. My inner and outer worlds were incompatible at a fundamental level, and I couldn’t figure out how to align the two.  

When my mom died, I learned that the world is not built for those who grieve despite how universal loss is, but didn’t understand until the death of my dad. Time as we know it insists on moving forward despite how so many people’s worlds stop every day. It does not account for the way grief removes you from the passage of time. For how grief keeps you in the same moment you were in when you found out you lost them, however painful it may be. Despite how universal loss is, not many know how to talk about it. Not many know how to look at a person, grief and all, and see them as whole. The pacing of what we consider a productive life insists that we forget our dead and the pieces of ourselves that go with them.  

During my senior year, a friend of mine who’d also lost her mother to cancer organized a dinner party (inspired by the Dinner Party) for students grieving the loss of a parent. It was the first time I’d been in a group with other people who’d experienced parental loss beyond the few friends I had. We each brought photos of our parents, sharing who they were when they were alive and how their deaths impacted us. A web of connections was drawn between us: we experienced loss from similar causes, during similar ages, or similar emotional and/or financial impacts.  

I spoke about the guilt I quietly had for not being there enough for my mom and subjecting her to waves of moodiness when I was, and I learned it was shared by other girls who’d lost their moms to cancer as teenagers.  By listening to them share their experiences I began to forgive myself for mine. We spent the evening laughing, crying, and eating together. We shared stories, exchanged phone numbers, and made plans for our next dinner. I felt seen and understood by people I’d just met that night, and felt at home in both the grief and joy there with us. 

Being with people who share and understand the depth of loss means I can openly remember and celebrate my parents. We can’t solve each other’s grief; we can’t soothe the anger we have for our losses, but we can see each other through it and honor the love that kindles it. Through these relationships, I’ve learned to look at the joy of knowing and loving my parents while holding the grief of losing them, and I’ve learned to share it widely.