Grief Came in Twos, july 2024
I didn’t expect my first real experience with grief to arrive like this—sudden, overlapping, and unbearably heavy. In the span of one week, I lost my dog and, in a much harder-to-define way, I lost my mom. Life works in cruel, mysterious ways. For the last year, I had been saying—and continuously thinking—how lucky I was to have never lost anyone I loved to death. Obviously, I knew it would happen one day, but not as soon as it did.
Delta was my childhood dog—my first real responsibility. I got her as a puppy when I was 13, at a time when I was drowning in severe depression, losing friends, and beginning to understand what it meant to live in a constant state of anxiety. I was deeply isolated. But then came this tiny creature who needed me—who didn’t care that I couldn’t hold myself together. She anchored me in the quiet when no one else knew how.
Delta was born on October 13—just two days after my birthday. In my 13-year-old mind, that meant we were meant to be. And maybe we were. Because for the next 14 years, she never left my side. She watched me grow up, break down, rebuild. She saw me cry more times than any human ever has. She experienced life with me—the most genuine me.
Her health dropped dramatically and suddenly. One day, she could walk. The next, her hind legs gave out. That marked the start of a slow, heartbreaking decline that lasted nearly a year and a half. She lost mobility, control over her body, her ability to move independently. Watching her fade in this way was unbearable.
But just days before her death, I got an alarming call about my mom.
My mama holding me in Cambodia. She traveled there alone to adopt me, then raised me on her own as a single mother.
She had gone to a workshop at Omega Institute—a rare thing after years of isolating post-COVID. I had encouraged her to go, hoping she’d do something for herself for once. But then I got word she was acting strange, disoriented. I had to push the staff to take her to the hospital. I’m still dumbfounded by their lack of urgency—by their failure to care for a clearly unwell woman without a family member directing them to. That’s when we learned: she had suffered a stroke.
Time is the most important factor when it comes to strokes. And while I can’t directly correlate the downfall of my mom’s health to the over five-hour delay in getting her to a hospital, it’s hard not to hold resentment toward Omega Institute—especially when my mom had given so much of herself and her money to that place since I was a little girl.
She was transferred to a neurological facility. I was trying to coordinate her care, speak with doctors, and process the gravity of it all—while in the middle of losing Delta. I had no time to catch my breath between heartbreaks.
“You’re just thinkin’ it’s a small thing that happened. The world ended when it happened to me”
And then, in January 2025, the second stroke hit.
This time, it took everything. Her ability to speak. Her ability to move. Her autonomy. Her independence. The second stroke taking her voice feels especially cruel—her entire life was built around speaking, listening, and comforting others. That was her work. Her identity.
She’s now in a long-term rehab facility three and a half hours away. I visit when I can, but between my job, my responsibilities, and my own exhaustion, it’s never as often as I want it to be. And each time I go, I brace myself for what I’ll see.
She’s paralyzed on her right side—her dominant side. No voice. Very limited facial expressions. Her eyes often look lifeless. She has some movement in her left arm, but it trembles and is restricted. Sometimes I think she recognizes me. Sometimes I hope she doesn’t. Because if she does—if she’s trapped inside that body, fully aware of everything she’s lost—I can’t begin to fathom the terror she must be feeling.
This is a different kind of grief. It’s not the grief that comes after someone is gone—it’s the kind that builds slowly in the waiting. The kind that lingers, week after week, when someone you love is technically still here, but everything that made them who they were is slipping away in front of you. It’s called anticipatory grief, and it’s brutal.
I think constantly about her suffering. What she might be feeling. Whether she knows what’s happened to her. Whether she’s in pain but can’t say it. Whether she’s scared. I cry when I imagine her lying in that bed, trapped there for months. And even before the second stroke, when she still had her voice, she had already been confined to a wheelchair, unable to do basic tasks like use the bathroom alone. For almost a year, she has lived the same day over and over again with no possibility of living anything differently ever again. She’s unable to call out. She’s not surrounded by the people who care about her.
I have to consciously pull myself back from imagining too hard what it must be like for her—because if I go too far down that road, I spiral. I cry because I can’t fix it. I cry because even though our relationship was far from easy, she was the sole reason I stayed alive for so long. (And now I have to go on a journey of what it means to live for myself—not for her.) And she’s still here, and I can’t reach her.
And then there’s the guilt.
Guilt for encouraging her to go to that workshop—as if things would be any different if she hadn’t. Was it the stress of traveling that triggered it? Or was the stroke bound to happen no matter where she was? I’ll never really know. Guilt that her facility isn’t closer. Guilt that I can’t be with her more often. Guilt that, sometimes, I just want it to be over—for her sake.
Because if she were a dog, we would’ve let her go already.
And I know that’s not a socially acceptable thing to say about your mother—but it’s the truth. Watching her like this doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels like cruelty.
The doctors told us this is it. This is the state she will remain in until the inevitable happens. And that’s when the moral questions start flooding in. We use medicine to heal people, to extend life—but what about in cases like this? When recovery is impossible. When survival becomes suffering.
We agreed to the permanent feeding tube because we thought—maybe—we could give her a chance. The doctors said without it, we’d need to prepare for hospice. Maybe we were being hopeful. Maybe we were clinging to what-ifs. And yes, the tube did extend her survival. But it hasn’t helped her live.
We intervene medically in situations like this because we don’t know what else to do. And because my mom never wrote down what she would’ve wanted in a situation like this, we had no choice but to hold on. But now, months later, with the clarity that only time and suffering can bring—I fear we may have made the wrong choice.
Just because we can keep her alive, doesn’t mean we should.
And saying that about someone you love more than anything in the world is the most heartbreaking, gut-wrenching thing I’ve ever had to admit. But it’s the reality I live with every day.
What I want for her is peace. What I want is for her to be free.
I never imagined grief could feel so layered—so active. Like a storm I’m constantly bracing against. I lost Delta, and now I’m losing my mom in the slowest, most agonizing way. And there’s no handbook for this kind of pain.
But I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only one. Someone out there is holding heartbreaks in both hands, just like me. Someone is crying in the car after visiting the hospital. Someone is whispering to a loved one who can’t answer back. Someone is grieving a soul who hasn’t left the room.
But that’s the thing about grief (or really any kind of sadness in this world): you know you’re not alone. You know thousands of people are going through similar things. And yet—you feel completely alone and isolated. Like not a single person could possibly understand what this feels like. Because the truth is, no two experiences of grief will ever be exactly the same.
You know you have your support people. But they have their own lives and their own troubles, and you don’t want to add to it. And the thing about grief is that it doesn’t stop. Maybe for some, the intensity lessens, but it’s always there. People show up at the start of a tragedy, but then they begin to drift. Or they get tired of hearing about the same pain. And out of guilt, you stop bringing it up—even though you think about it every second of every day.
“Grief is just love with no place to go. It’s actually kind of okay to miss somebody... That sadness... it’s kind of gift. It’s kind of a lovely thing to feel. It means you really loved somebody when you miss them.”
It makes it hard to connect with others. Because this is a constant force in your life—not theirs. I don’t speak much about this with people anymore. Because after a few months, it just feels like being a broken record. People expect you to be “handling things better.” To have moved on. To be okay.
If that’s you: I see you. I’m with you. There is no right way to do this.
All I know is that love stays, even when the people we love can’t.
Every day, I think about the people who are living through trauma, surviving heartbreak, saying their final goodbyes, and still finding a way to live another day despite it all. I think about them often—in solidarity, in quiet awe, or wishing I could somehow find them, recognize them out in the world, and ask: How are you getting yourself through this?
It’s always been hard for me to connect with people, mostly because I’ve never fully subscribed to small talk. To be honest, when I meet someone for the first time, I don’t care about the bath tiles you’re choosing or what vacation you just came back from. I want to know what’s beneath that. Why are you the way you are? What grief have you lived through? What’s one of the happiest moments of your life—and why?
Maybe people are more open to that last question. But more often than not, I find that the depth I’m searching for—in relationships, in character—is hard to come by. Maybe I’ve always been drawn to sorrow, or maybe I just value stories that are born from struggle. I care about the hurt people have been through. I want to hear it. I want to know what they’ve learned, if anything, from surviving something so difficult.
I know this isn’t how modern socializing works. You can’t walk up to someone and expect them to bare their soul. It’s not always healthy—or appropriate—to ask someone to open their wounds. But I guess what I’m really seeking is substance. I want to understand why someone is the way they are—not to judge them, but to connect with them. To see if our inner worlds can meet in a meaningful way.
I’ve been through a lot. I carry a heavy amount of childhood trauma and emotional baggage. And while I try not to let that define me, the truth is, it shapes how I move through the world. It shapes how I love. How I protect myself. How I show up in relationships. I don’t need someone to have the same wounds as me—but I need someone who’s done the work to understand their own. I want to know if they’ve been cracked open and still found a way to soften, if they’ve learned anything from the hard parts.
Because I’m full of love. I want to give it, and I want to be understood, too—not just on the surface, but really seen for who I am, including the messiness. So yes, I want to know what shaped someone, so I can understand not just who they are—but how we might exist together, honestly.
I can feel this grief changing me—which should come as no surprise. I’m so aware of the shift that I’ve started to self-isolate more than usual. The truth is, I don’t really know who I am right now. So how can I show up for my friends—or even make new ones—when the losses of Delta and my mom have left parts of me dead or dying alongside them?
In my own recovery, I’ve found that solitude is the best medicine. I can’t extend myself outward when I feel so fractured inward. I need time. I need space. I need to go on a journey to rebuild what’s left of me—and maybe discover who I’m becoming in the process.
When someone mentions a loss in passing—when it’s quietly brushed over and you can tell they don’t want to go deeper—the polite, socially acceptable thing to do is let it go. But for me, I guess this is just a note to anyone who might be reading:
I want to hear about your grief. And I want to tell you about mine.
xx el