Some thoughts on grief...
I was 31 when my mom died on November 7th, 2025, at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, a year-and-a-half after her cancer diagnosis that ended with a devastating six weeks in hospital. Seven years earlier, on November 14th, my dad died from cancer while at home, three years after his diagnosis. There were many differences between their cancer journeys; the most significant being my role as a primary caregiver for my mom while my dad had my stepmom caring for him. There were also a lot of similarities – the many visits to Princess Margaret, the raising and dashing of hopes as treatments or trials didn’t work as planned, the cancers themselves being aggressive and difficult to treat, the dark cloud of a sick parent hanging overhead, and, thankfully, that I was able to be with both of them as they died.
Both losses were seismic and heartbreaking, but losing my mom has knocked me out and altered my life in a way I truly didn’t know was possible.
Only now do I feel like there’s a moment to come up for air - 11 months later. I’m grateful this moment is here, however brief it may be. There have been smatterings of less dark moments over the past year, of course, though they’ve never amounted to a genuine or enduring feeling of lightness. I still consider them to be lifesaving – resuscitations needed to keep me alive – but being in this moment, off the ventilator and able to breathe on my own for a little while, feels like a miracle I wasn’t sure I’d get to experience.
There’s a conflicted feeling I get when I surprise myself by being able to make a joke or genuinely laugh at something or when I’m able to carry on a conversation longer than a few minutes and not feel drained by it. Or when I’m simply able to enjoy a sunny day or reply to someone’s text without it overwhelming me. A sudden realization of, “Wait, it’s been months since I’ve been able to do this.” A transient moment of clarity on just how immense and overshadowing this sadness has been. For a second, I feel the relief that comes with realizing this all-encompassing stage of grief is, while debilitating, something temporary rather than some kind of permanent fixture I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life. It’s fleeting, but powerful. A quick bird’s eye view of the forest I’ve been desperately lost in.
When these moments happen, I briefly feel that a life of meaning and fulfillment is, in fact, something that still exists. It’s not in reach but it’s there in the distance, like a far-off star. It’d be narratively nice to say that I can see the star again after all this time, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been able to see it. It’s always been there, obviously, and stars are very bright (at least that’s what Big Space wants us to think). Instead, I’d say I haven’t been able to feel it; that none of its light has touched my skin for a long time. Losing my mom crushed me into something so impossibly small that there was no chance of any light, from anywhere, being able to touch me.
I still feel this way sometimes – like a little speck floating through a vast, empty space. Just passing by and through everything, never making contact. Too small to be pulled in by the planets or stars. Too tiny to collide or interact with anything no matter how beautiful or alluring. This grief, which began the day my mom tearfully told me about her diagnosis over the phone while I was on my way to a dentist appointment, chipped away at me until I was nothing but that little speck. Stripped of almost everything I used to be save the bare minimum of simple existence.
I know that’s all very grand and existential. I can’t help it. Parents dying is, evidently, very grand and existential. Though, I will say at this point I’m pretty over every day feeling so profound.
If I were to be a bit less poetic about it, I might say it’s like being in a store that sells everything I want and not being able to afford anything; it’s all right there in front of me but I can’t have it. Dating, enjoying a nice walk, having fun at a friend’s birthday party, being creatively motivated – pretty much anything that requires fun, happiness, contentment, calm… I see others being able to buy those things and it just makes me sadder and envious. Time goes on and it feels like this is the way things are now, forever.
Of course, I know it’s not forever. Nothing lasts forever – a phrase coined by Maroon 5 in 2007 and a law of the universe I believe in. It’s like believing that the sky is blue – a colour invented by Troye Sivan in 2015 and a scientific truth I also believe in. But if every day is overcast and grey for long enough, it’s easy to forget or not care that there’s anything else up there besides dark, grey clouds. And even if there is, what difference does it make to believe that if I can never see it?
Well… the difference, for me, is a life that continues versus one I struggle to justify.
The darkest time of my life was in January and February of this year when I realized I no longer had an underlying belief that happiness was still possible for me and that I’d be able to make it through the heartbreak – a belief I was largely unaware I ever had but in retrospect was probably one of the things that kept me from going over the edge during depressive moments or suicidal ideation throughout my young adulthood. Thinking about and exploring my own death – sometimes emotionally, sometimes as a thought experiment - has always been a consistent habit of mine, though to be clear I’ve never fallen into a state of acute crisis.
The other thing that always kept me from entertaining it more seriously, which I was very aware of, was reminding myself how devastated my mom would be if I ever did anything.
This period from last winter is something I’d like to write about separately so I won’t get into it here, but I bring it up because it was the clearest I’ve ever felt that any tethers keeping me here were gone and I no longer believed or cared that there was anything other than overcast in my future. It felt like I could see a literal fork in the road in front of me and there was only one path that would let me make it long enough to at least get to mom’s service in June, and to choose it, I had to choose to believe that something else was possible even when it felt like everything was screaming in my face that it wasn’t.
This isn’t me coming out as religious; I’m not talking about God or any specific belief system. I’m talking about the immense impact and power of just believing that something else is possible: a simple, unconscious belief that I took for granted until it was stripped from me. The act of believing, on its own, is a monumental win when it becomes a conscious choice made from a place of hopelessness.
The wording of “something else” instead of “something better” is also a conscious choice here. As true as I believe it to be, “it gets better” may not always be the most helpful framing for someone in the thick of grief and possibly determined to reject support (picture me raising my hand here). “It gets different” doesn’t have the same motivational ring to it, and I wouldn’t say that out loud to anyone unironically, but it was a necessary part of the journey for me; a more accessible bridge to being able to eventually believe that, yes, things will get better.
The chasm between dark clouds and a blue sky feels so impossibly big sometimes. There are fewer mental gymnastics involved in believing that tomorrow the clouds might be a different kind of grey, or they’ll make some thunder at some point, or unleash some much needed rain, or perhaps even produce a tornado a week from now. Because the pain we’re experiencing may evolve or get worse in some way, but in order believe that, we must first believe things can change. And believing that is the first step toward believing that maybe one day, they’ll be better than they are now.
I recognize that “believing things can change” is a pretty fundamental concept most of us probably understand by early childhood, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes a little at how I’ve presented this idea. But grief often doesn’t care about what we think we know or understand about ourselves and the world. Feeling as though I was starting over and rebuilding my entire life has made relearning the basics feel revolutionary, like I’m discovering truths about the world for the first time. When that happens, I feel this presence of a childlike curiosity and empathy holding out its hand to me, offering a way to reconnect with the world I’ve felt so distant from.
This thought leads me into the concept of gratitude but I think that deserves its own unpacking. For now, I’ll simply say that it has been another lifeline for me throughout this past year.
My goal isn’t to be prescriptive, as everyone’s journey through grief is very different. I can only confidently say that at the time of writing this, a few months removed from that incredibly dark moment last winter, these perspectives and ideas are what helped me get here. Things aren’t great but they’re better. I’m not that tiny speck anymore. Against all odds, I’m now a slightly larger speck; one that bumps into things every so often and feels the light of distant stars again, looking for new tethers instead of being convinced that no others exist.
Somehow, I put what felt like wasted faith into believing things could be different, and it ended up saving my life.