During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
I didn't start grieving for my mother properly until I was maybe 16.
I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.
I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'
But I still always felt the absence of a mother.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
I had a daughter and lost her a long while ago. That's too sad a story to go into.
I lost my mother when I was very young, and my father when I was in college.
Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!
When I had to bury my child, I probably didn't start grieving until a year and a half later.