Thank you for sharing your stories. For people like me, it hits so close to home it’s sometimes unthinkable.

I cried one day while my 2 year old was watching Onward and I was making breakfast. Barley was explaining his 4th memory of his dad, how he was so sick and he was too scared to say anything. My mother passed in 2010 when I was just 17. She was a big woman in life, really a force to be reckoned with; but at that moment, on her death bed, she was nothing. Skin and bones. She didn’t have the energy to even speak. Right then when I could have told her I was sorry for being a bratty teenager, for every gray hair I ever caused, for hanging up on her out of frustration – when I could have told her how much I admired her and loved her and what an impact she had – I didn’t. I did nothing. I said nothing. I sat next to her and felt her cool skin and didn’t say a word. I left the room, cried while my brother held me, and the next I remember I woke up at 5am to my sister telling me she was gone. It took me longer to stop being afraid to say things, but I got there.

The first time I heard Just Take A Shower I had to listen to it over and over and over. I spent months after my mother passed in a dark state. I don’t remember any of it, except sitting on my front porch step on my 18th birthday cursing the world and God and wishing everything was gone. I was almost someone’s tragedy – my father’s, sisters’, brothers, best friend… and although I came out of the depths, I wasn’t out of the woods for another 3 years. Once I finally started to feel okay again I got a call that my best friend and oldest’s godfather had taken his life and it all started over again. It is harder to try to come out of that place when you don’t have time to grieve, when you’re responsible for another human. When you have to be an adult and put your grief on the shelf to revisit late at night when the world is supposed to be calm and instead the silence comes crashing in like thunderclouds. I started going on drives and putting the most painful music on full blast and just screaming until I couldn’t hear or feel anymore. Step by step I have moved through the life, and they are still dead, and somehow I am happy. The pain isn’t gone and sometimes it is unbearable but there are evenings when I’m allowed to enjoy a somber, reminiscent quiet that doesn’t clap with thunder but patters softly with cleansing rain.

Thank you for sharing your stories. Thank you for putting your pain into a medium that helps others get closure where none was offered. Thank you for helping me process my ongoing pain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.