Why I, a memoirist, will not be apologizing for grieving my perfectly healthy mother

You are likely reading this on your phone, and if you look at your notifications, there is a good chance she is there. She has sent you a link to an article about the health benefits of turmeric. She has asked if you are still using that streaming password. She is, aggressively and unapologetically, alive.

And you, because you have not yet done the work, are engaging with her. You text back a polite acknowledgment of the turmeric. You confirm the password. You allow the messy, uncurated reality of her biological existence to tether you to the present, draining your emotional reserves and completely suffocating your creative potential. You are exhausted because you are actively maintaining a relationship with a living mother.

There is a better way. Across the sun-drenched lofts of Brooklyn and the reclaimed-wood coffee shops of Silver Lake, a quiet revolution is taking place. We are no longer waiting for our parents to succumb to the ravages of time before we begin the agonizing, beautiful, and deeply photogenic work of processing their deaths. We are embracing the profound peace of anticipatory narrative bereavement.

I came to this realization last winter. I was sitting at my desk—a slab of ethically sourced elm—trying to write honestly about my childhood. I wanted to craft a devastating personal essay about the ghosts of our past, but I was continually interrupted by the subject of the essay asking if I wanted her to bring over her spare slow cooker.

I realized then that I needed distance. True distance. You cannot achieve narrative clarity when the protagonist of your trauma is actively participating in a water aerobics class. The ongoing respiration of my mother was a toxic boundary violation, preventing me from honoring my truth. So, I did the only healthy thing a writer can do: I began to write about her as if she had already tragically passed away.

It was a revelation. Freed from the burden of her actual personality, I was able to construct a mother who was haunting, silent, and beautifully tragic. I wrote about the scent of her phantom perfume lingering in the hallway. I wrote about the agonizing silence of a phone that never rings, conveniently ignoring the fact that my phone was currently ringing with a FaceTime call from her iPad.

I was healing. I purchased a very expensive, loosely knit cashmere cardigan—the kind of garment that suggests you are shivering from the chill of profound loss, even in a climate-controlled apartment. I began taking long, solitary walks along the waterfront, holding a ceramic mug of bone broth, staring out at the grey waves and whispering my forgiveness to the wind.

Of course, when you establish a healthy boundary, those who benefit from your lack of boundaries will push back. When I completed the manuscript, I decided to share it with her. I printed it on heavy-stock, unbleached paper and handed it to her over a brunch of biodynamic orange wine and poached eggs.

I watched her read the chapter titled 'The Silence She Left Behind.' I was ready to hold space for her reaction. I expected her to validate my vulnerability, to marvel at the elegant, sparse prose I had used to describe her fictional demise.

Instead, she was hurt. She looked up from the pages and asked why I had described her as succumbing to a quiet, elegant wasting disease when she had just completed a local half-marathon. She said that reading a detailed account of her own funeral, complete with a playlist of indie-folk covers I had curated for the imagined service, was upsetting. She claimed that fiction did not protect any of us from pain.

I took a deep breath, grounding myself in my somatic reality. I realized in that moment that she was completely missing the point. She was making my grief about her. She was refusing to center my healing journey, insisting instead on prioritizing her own lived experience of currently being alive. It was a classic narcissistic defense mechanism.

I am not alone in this struggle. Fiona, a 31-year-old somatic breathwork facilitator in Asheville, recently began mourning her parents, both of whom are retired and currently on a river cruise in Europe.

Fiona tells me that the decision to emotionally bury her parents has completely transformed her weekend routine. She no longer feels the pressure to answer their Sunday phone calls. Instead, she lights a hand-poured vetiver candle, wraps herself in a linen throw, and spends the afternoon weeping softly over a photo album she intentionally distressed with sandpaper to make it look like a salvaged relic.

Fiona understands that we cannot wait for the universe to hand us our trauma on a silver platter. We must proactively curate our grief so that it fits our current aesthetic and emotional bandwidth. If we wait for our mothers to actually die, we might be busy. We might be in a bad place to process it. By doing the work now, we take control of the narrative.

There is a specific, undeniable luxury in mourning someone who is perfectly fine. The grief is clean. It does not smell like hospital bleach or stale waiting-room coffee. It smells like matcha and expensive room spray. It is a grief that you can pause when you have a dinner reservation.

We must ask ourselves why we allow the biological reality of a beating heart to dictate our emotional timelines. Who does that serve? Certainly not the artist. Certainly not the empath who needs a quiet weekend to themselves.

If your mother is still alive, I gently suggest you ask yourself what her continued existence is costing you creatively. Look at the clutter of your relationship. Look at the mundane, un-poetic text messages. Look at the Tupperware she insists you return. Ask yourself if this is the energy you want to carry into the next phase of your life.

You do not need to wait for a medical professional to pronounce her dead. You have a journal. You have a favorite pen. You have the power to sit down in a sunlit corner of your apartment and give her the quiet, tasteful, and entirely fictional send-off she deserves.

So please, for your own sake, stop texting her back. Put on your most oversized sweater. Brew a cup of loose-leaf tea. Let the tears fall onto the unlined pages of your notebook. You will be amazed at how much closer you feel to her once you finally accept that, for the sake of your art, she is already gone.