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When my mom died, my uncle held my hands and said something like:
"You're gonna have some tough days ahead of you."
It wasn't exactly a comforting thing to say. But it was the truest thing anyone said to me in those early weeks.
And he was right.
The days grief visits you.
What I learnt is that grief doesn't have a timeline, or an end date. Of course, I expected the first few months and year to be tough, but what I didn't expect is that this tsunami of emotion can suddenly hit you even after years, in the most mundane settings.
Mine found me in a supermarket.
It was almost a year after my mom’s passing, the first week watermelons came back into season. There they were, stacked by the entrance, enormous and completely ordinary. And I just stopped. Right there in the aisle. My hand on one of the watermelons. Suddenly, I was back in our kitchen on a hot summer afternoon, watching her cut watermelon.
She had this specific way of doing it. She'd slice the pieces so the rind stayed on just enough that your hands wouldn't get sticky. Because I really didn’t like getting my hands sticky.
She just thought about the small things like that. That was her. The kind of person who considered your comfort in so many small ways. An enormously loving person, in the quietest ways. A whole life of small, caring acts that added up to a person I called mom.
I had to leave the shopping trolley and go outside.
I cried (more like wailed) in a car park over a watermelon. And honestly, I don't think I've ever felt her absence more acutely than in that moment. There, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, because the watermelon season is back, it reminded me of all those small and beautiful things she's done for me.
That's the thing about grief nobody warned me about. Grief doesn't only come in the big moments. It hits more acutely and painfully for the small ones. The ones so specific, so private, that I couldn't explain to anyone else.
Turning loss into something meaningful
After that watermelon ‘episode’, I made a decision.
She was such a beautiful person who represented everything simple and wholesome in my life. Warmth. Caring touches. The small things that actually matter. And I reflected how much of my current life runs opposite to all of that. The busyness, the hustle, the relentless pressure to keep moving filled so much of my life, and I had lost touch with the small ways of noticing and expressing my love and care with people I love.
I decided to honor her life by living more like she did.
Living attentively.
I can't say this is the right way to grieve. I'm not sure if there is one. But this realization gave me something to do with the love that had nowhere to go. And that somehow got me through the hardest days.
What I know now
Nothing anyone says or does changes the fact that losing someone is the hardest thing. No amount of reframing makes their absence smaller.
But grief, I've found, it doesn't only sink in. It also clarifies. It showed me, with uncomfortable precision, what actually matters. And I feel that clarity can become a kind of gift from the person we lost.
My mom would have liked knowing that her death made me slower. More present. More grateful for the ordinary things. Things like how to cut a watermelon.
— Judith Tong, Santa Monica, CA