You’re standing in the card aisle. Maybe it’s CVS, maybe it’s Walgreens — somewhere fluorescent, somewhere you ducked in for something else entirely. And there they are: the cards. The ones with the soft photographs of mothers and daughters, the ones with the watercolor flowers, the ones that say You’ve always been my hero and Every day I’m grateful to call you Mom. You scan them. You put one back. You scan another. And then — quietly, unremarkably, in an aisle full of people doing the same thing — something in you just drops.
Maybe your mother died. Maybe she’s alive but the relationship is severed, or fragile, or so tangled in history that even a phone call feels like a negotiation. Maybe she was never really available to you, even when she was standing right there.
None of those cards are for you. And yet here you are, taking up space in the world, needing something that no one seems to be selling.
what we mean by grief
Grief is a word we tend to reserve for death. But grief is really just the response to loss — and loss takes many forms.
When a mother has died, the calendar can be ruthless. Grief that has settled into the background of daily life has a way of resurfacing around dates. You might reach for your phone out of habit. You might find yourself, unexpectedly, in tears at the brunch table, in the middle of a toast, in the card aisle at CVS. This is normal. This is the way grief works — not linearly, not on any schedule you could predict, but in waves that return on their own timetable.
When a relationship is estranged or strained, the grief is just as real — and often harder to name. There is no moment of loss you can point to, no date to mark, no ritual that says this counts. Grief researchers have a term for this: disenfranchised grief. It’s the grief that exists outside the frame of social recognition, that doesn’t come with casseroles or bereavement leave or a word of condolence from anyone. You are mourning something — the mother you needed, the relationship you always hoped for, the version of yourself that could be close to her without cost. That is real loss. It deserves real space.
what it might look like
Grief around a holiday doesn’t always arrive as sadness. It might look like irritability that surprises you. A sudden desire to simply not participate in any of it — to close the blinds and wait for Monday. A low, unnameable heaviness that settles in sometime around Thursday and doesn’t lift until the week is over.
It might look like scrolling past the posts on social media — the tributes, the old photographs, the gratitude — and feeling something you can’t quite put into words but that lands somewhere between longing and fury and something quieter than either of those.
Whatever form it takes: it makes sense. You are responding to a real thing.
what can help
There’s no prescription here. But a few things tend to matter.
Naming it helps. Not performing it, not explaining it to everyone — just allowing yourself to say, privately: this weekend is hard, and here’s why. Grief that has a name tends to move a little more freely than grief that doesn’t.
Opting out is allowed. You are not obligated to participate in cultural rituals that cause you pain. Declining the brunch, muting Instagram for a day, leaving the gathering early — these are not failures. They are self-knowledge, which is a form of self-care.
Finding your own acknowledgment can help. Some people find it meaningful to mark the day in a personal way — visiting a place that mattered, sitting with a photograph, writing something down, doing something that honors what was and also what you needed that wasn’t there. Ritual belongs to you. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.
You don’t have to carry it alone. Grief is lighter when it is witnessed. A trusted friend, a support group, a therapist who can sit with you in the hard parts — connection is not a luxury here. It is the medicine.
a note on the long view
Grief has its own timeline. Each year is different — some harder, some gentler, some simply quieter. What I can tell you, from sitting with people in the middle of this, is that the goal is never to be done with it. The goal is to carry it without being flattened by it — to find enough room, inside an ordinary life, for grief and for everything else at the same time.
That is not small work. But it is possible.
If you’re in Seattle and looking for support around grief, family estrangement, or the complicated emotions this season can bring up, I’d be glad to connect. A free 15-minute consultation is a good place to start — no commitment, no pressure.