What It Looks Like

This week was the anniversary of my mother's death and unlike the rest of that side of my family, I did not post anything about it or acknowledge it until now because, after this amount of time, I didn't want to. I am allowed to miss my mother by myself, without involving anyone else. I didn't even remember on the day of, truthfully, until I was home, on my couch at the end of the day. It occurred to me almost as an afterthought, something in the back of my mind getting pushed up to the front. The fact that most of the day went by without incident and then the memory that I still miss her came back to me at a convenient hour, after I was done attending to my responsibilities, when I didn't have to put on a show for anyone, frankly, was kind of a relief. For years, I would be inconsolable for the entire day, and in reality the week leading up to and following it. I would be despondent in the morning, flinty and anxious all day, crying on and off like it had just happened yesterday because it felt as if it had just happened yesterday. This year, I got through most of the day, and when it bothered me it was a less sharp pain. It has been eighteen years, and this gives some weight to the adage that time heals all wounds.
I grieve privately, and I am allowed to grieve privately. I don't need to plaster the fact that the hurt of losing my mom still aches all over a social networking site and I know this might make me a horrible person, but when my family starts posting things about it in a way that feels as though they are doing so on my behalf, I don't appreciate it. My sister posts a status update outlining her own sadness over it and tags me, roping me in with it as if she can just assume she knows how I feel, that my emotions must mirror hers. My cousin posts pictures of my mother from when she was in the hospital, at her worst, no longer the healthy, alive person I want to remember, but looking shrunken, like a husk of who she was, and tags me in the photos so they show up in my timeline without warning, and without my permission. They mean no harm by doing so, and I have no right to be annoyed by this but the thing that gets me is no one asked me. To make their grief public is their prerogative, but they still haven't absorbed by now that it is just not how I do things. I might work things out this way, by writing about it, and while this is public, this is me speaking for myself. This is not a photo of my mother in a hospital bed smiling despite the fact that she is fighting a fight she can't win, or my sister broadcasting her needs to all of her friends and, by extension, my friends. The fact that this makes me so angry is ridiculous, and I can never confront them, and of course I never will because it will only create more problems. I will talk about it, but trying to get my family to change would be like showing black horses, to use one of my mother's famous malapropisms.
My mother's family does this often, not just around the time of year when she died. Every once in a while, one of my aunts posts a picture of my mother on Facebook, and of course tags me even though I'm not in the photo. I know they mean well, and of course they are trying to keep her memory alive, but all it does is remind me that my mother is gone. I don't need to be reminded that my mother is gone. I do remember it, all the time, to the point where it almost seems like she was never even alive at all, and I have trouble remembering a time when I wasn't missing her. I had twelve years with my mother before she died, but sometimes those years seem like they never even happened. This is what my grief looks like. It looks like me struggling to remember what it felt like to actually have a mom. It looks like feeling guilty over being unable to form a bond that is more than just a friendship with my stepmother because I don't know how to be a grown woman with a mother. It looks like that disconnect extending all the way to my relationship with my father, how I feel like I try to be more of a friend than a daughter to him. It looks like keeping my family at arm's length because I know they could be gone at any moment and maybe if we aren't so close, it won't hurt as much. It looks like something I don't want everyone to look at because I am not proud of it, so I keep it to myself. It does not look like a status update written by someone else.