Grief - Silently Waiting
My mother died two years ago, but I could not find the space to mourn her.
Grief recently arrived quietly and waited at the threshold, because after her death my father's needs filled every area of my life. There were practicalities to manage, emotions to absorb, expectations to meet. In the aftermath of her death, I became useful. I became responsible. I became attentive to everyone except myself.
Two years passed in that strange suspended state where loss is present but never fully acknowledged. My mother's absence was everywhere, yet there was never enough silence to sit beside it. Every attempt to turn towards my own sorrow was interrupted by another demand, another crisis, another reminder that my role was to carry, not to feel.
Without realizing it, I began to lose sight of myself. My thoughts, my needs, my identity all became tangled in the effort of holding someone else together. The daughter my mother had known seemed to disappear beneath the weight of being the person my father required.
The distance came slowly at first. A boundary here, a refusal there.
Then one day I collapsed and understood that if I did not step away, there would be nothing left of me to save. Creating that distance felt like another bereavement. There was sorrow in it, and relief. There was sadness for what could never be repaired, shame because I thought he could change, but also gratitude for the breathing space it gave me.
For the first time since my mother's death, I could hear my own voice again.
It was then that I began to grieve.
Not in churches or counselling rooms, but with my hands in the soil.
Through my coastal allotment, grief found a language I could finally understand. I learned it through the slow rhythm of digging and planting, through the patient work of tending medicinal herbs from seed to harvest.
The earth asked nothing of me except presence. It did not demand explanations or strength. It simply received whatever I brought to it.
As I pressed seeds into the ground, I found myself speaking to my mother. Sometimes aloud, sometimes only in thought. Memories surfaced unexpectedly among the rows of herbs—her laughter, her odd ways, the small details that had remained hidden beneath two years of obligation and exhaustion.
Above me, the gulls cried on the sea wind, their voices carrying across the allotments like echoes from another world. Around me, cheeky blackbirds followed faithfully, hopping close as I turned the soil, waiting for worms and insects to appear. Their bold little presence became a kind of companionship. They arrived each day without fail, reminding me that life continues in all its ordinary, persistent forms.
In that place, between sea and earth, I began to understand that grief is not something to overcome. It is something to cultivate. Like the herbs I grow, it requires time, patience, attention and care. Neglected, it hardens. Given room, it transforms.
The allotment became the place where I finally met my mother's absence and discovered that love still existed within it. Not as a wound demanding to be closed, but as something living, changing and growing.
I still miss her.
I always will.
I kneel in the soil with the wind coming in from the coast and the blackbirds gathering at my feet, I feel less pain of losing her. My legacy was stolen from me by my father, but I feel the quiet inheritance Mum left behind: a capacity for nurture, for growth.
Among the herbs, beneath the gulls, with earth beneath my fingernails, I found my way back to my grief.
And, in doing so, I'm finding my way back to myself.
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