Whose grief is worse? Did it hurt you more to lose your cat than it did for me to say goodbye to my mom? Is your pain more important because your baby had a name and made it to a week of gestation in which they were supposed to live? I don’t know the answers to these questions- but they weigh on my heart often. Why do we compare our pain? Why do we compare our lives? Is there a 1-10 scale somewhere that tells me where my grief should fall compared to the tragedies that have happened in your life? If I were to rate my emotional pain the same way I ask my patients to rate their physical pain- I would say the death of my mom was a 6 and the death of my baby was an 8. But is that fair? To relegate my mom to a 6? What if my friend’s cat is also a 6? I think a 10 should be reserved for the tragedies that you don’t recover from. When your whole family is killed in car accident on the way home from vacation, when your 9 year old son dies after sitting on your shoulders at a concert. Those are 10s. How do you live again after something like that happens to someone you love? The morbidity of these thoughts in my head haunts me, why do I care how much pain someone else feels compared to the pain that I feel? Back to the cat friend- she once apologized to me for talking about how her mom is getting older and she wants to spend more time with her while we were out to dinner with a group of friends. Huh… I thought. She said she had said it without thinking and she was sorry. Is that a rule in loss- you can’t talk about moms in the presence of someone who has lost their own mom? Or was I supposed to be offended that she recognized her mom was getting older and their time together may not be limitless? I was confused and thinking- you should apologize to me for memorializing your cat more publicly than I have honored my mom. My feelings aren’t hurt that you recognize the importance of your relationship with your own mother.

I feel shame for thinking these thoughts. What we carry in our hearts isn’t a competition. You don’t owe me an explanation for why the burden of your pain is heavier than mine. But maybe it’s my way of making my own pain feel valid. That I have somehow earned this level of heartache and the personal dysfunction that comes along with it. Once you experience a level 8 grief, I think you’re excused from life for a while. When you have a level 6 + 8 within 6 weeks of each other, you should apparently get to stop taking responsibility for your behaviors. Turns out at level 6 + 8, you let everyone you love most pick up the pieces of your pain. Your husband makes all your dinners and cleans the house, he also runs the errands; your best friend stops getting her phone calls returned; your family inherits the brunt of your bitterness; and your coworkers learn the limits of your patience. Does comparing my pain to yours help me justify my failures? Maybe I’m just selfish, I what I really want is for you to know that my heart hurts more than yours.

I used to think I knew sadness. How naive and silly of me to believe the world to be such a gentle place. I assumed that there was a limit to the load any one person would be asked to bear. But now, I have discovered that pain is a bottomless pit and grief is a desperate existence.

On October 15, 2018 I watched my mom take her last breath as her prolonged battle with illness finally ended. I was too young to lose her, I decided. It wasn’t fair that she wouldn’t be here for my major life milestones ahead- pregnancy, birth, marriage, parenting, a job promotion, home remodels and all of the more minor events of daily life that we choose to share with our moms. My mom was 60, not 90. 60 is not when you are supposed to say goodbye to your mom. But I was prepared to say goodbye to my mom.

One year before her death, the doctors had told us that without a heart transplant she had 1-2 years to live. At first, we were optimistic that she would soon be living with a borrowed, better heart. As the days turned to weeks and weeks to months, we never lost our hope despite the reality that screamed loudly in front of us. Eventually, reality shrieked louder, and we stopped being able to totally ignore it. We usually tolerated this uncomfortable truth of death for a minute, and then swatted it away. Over and over again. I was lucky in these fleeting moments of acceptance, that I was able to have deep, difficult, and honest conversations with my mom. What would I do when she wasn’t there to zip my dress before I walked down the aisle? Who was going to hold my hand when I couldn’t push another time to deliver my baby? How was I going to finish baking the pineapple pudding on Thanksgiving when she forgot to right down exactly how much pineapple I needed? Who was going to listen when when I complained about the woes of my world? How do you do any of these things without your mom? She answered all of these questions for me and we cried together often. I asked her what she was afraid of. Mostly, she just felt sad. Sad she wouldn’t be there to witness all that was to come, the good and the bad, in our future lives. Sad that we would be forced to do it all without her. But she insisted with so much confidence, that when she left us behind on this lonely earth we would be okay. She believed in our strength and our ability to succeed amidst our sadness. Her conviction in this was so real that I even believed it myself.

But then my baby died.

And maybe we’d be okay if we just told the truth about what’s hurting us.
-Chloe Frayne