It's Okay to Not Be Okay

They say that with the passage of time death anniversaries become easier … which to some degree is true. For several years now, the anniversary of my mom’s death has come and gone with little disruption to my life. We were not close. In fact, as she was my abuser, I spent most of her final years hating her. She may have been a good person (the people who spoke at her funeral seemed to think so), but she was not a good mother. Which of course added a whole other complicated aspect to my grieving process. At any rate, thanks to large amounts of therapy, her anniversary usually comes and goes with little fanfare now.

What they don’t tell you, is that grief operates in waves. And this year hit me like a truck. She died on February 8th and we all gathered for her funeral on the 14th … yes, Valentine’s day. Which makes it super awkward every year when I tell people that I’m not a fan of the holiday and they then tease me about commercialism. I brush this off, but to the few who persist I reply, “No, we buried my mother on Valentine’s day.” I could refrain from saying anything and let the moment pass, but by this point they’ve generally annoyed me and tact has flown out the window.

At any rate, the past several weeks have been bad. My depression got worse, I became irritable, and I had zero patience. The weird thing was that when I lost my patience I wound up crying, which is not like me at all. I’m not a crier, never have been. I chalked this up to post-surgical frustration. I’m far enough out from my surgery that my shoulder is feeling better, but I’m still in the sling and so beyond done with being in a sling and having to do everything one handed. I know I have to have patience and let it heal, but I’m going nuts because I’m definitely more of an active healer – let’s do exercises and stretches – than a sit still healer. So I figured this was the cause of the moodiness, put my head down, carried on with life, and tried to push through it as much as possible.

I can’t say that I was overly successful with this strategy as an acquaintance, newly turned friend, picked up on my mood and asked if I was okay. She said that I had seemed off lately. I started to explain about the surgery, when my brain and mouth switched topics on me and I found myself explaining that it was the anniversary of my mom’s death, and this one marks the point where I have now been alive longer without her, then I was with her. Huh. My subconscious had figured this out weeks earlier, hence the drastic change in my mood.

That’s when she surprised me. She didn’t ask about my mom, she didn’t ask how that made me feel, she didn’t feel sorry for me. She validated that that was a really good reason to be in a funk, and it sucked. Which is honestly exactly what I needed. She knew that I wasn’t okay, and she felt no need to try to fix me. She knew that this would pass, and here was the mind-blower: she saw no problem in the fact that, temporarily, I wasn’t okay. She still wanted to hang out with me, she still wanted to chat. She didn’t need to wait for it all to blow over, for me to be in a better mood. Life, our friendship, could continue even while I wasn’t okay.

A couple days later my best friend reiterated this same sentiment, “It’s okay to not be okay.” I didn’t need an excuse, I didn’t need a logical reason and I didn’t need to explain myself. It was my mom’s anniversary, I wasn’t okay, and that was fine. I was allowed to feel what I was feeling without trying to fix anything. In retrospect, this seems obvious – I say retrospect, because the funk has passed and I’m doing much better. But at the time it was far from obvious.

So for anyone else who needs to hear this, you are allowed to not be okay. You don’t always have to be fixed.