Grief has a funny way of shape-shifting.
This week, it wasn’t tears for the daughter I lost — it was a deep, gnawing ache for the two I still have.
My 22-year-old twins — brilliant, overwhelmed, and barely keeping their heads above water — are calling home more often. I don’t know whether to feel proud, panicked, or just permanently tired.
After the holidays, my son headed back to grad school in a rainstorm that looked like the apocalypse. He didn’t want to go. I saw it in the way he lingered over breakfast, the way he came to sit beside me and rested his head on my shoulder — something he never does — on the very morning he was supposed to leave. My husband offered to drive with him. My son accepted gratefully, still dragging his feet. It would have been sweet if it hadn’t also been quietly heartbreaking.
I had to nudge him. Push him, really. With all the love I have, and all the heartbreak that comes with it. Because that push meant: I trust you to try again.
Meanwhile, my daughter — across the country, in a new city, three months into a brutal nursing job — is unraveling. She says she’s “fine,” but her voice betrays her. It turns brittle when she talks about work. She’s admitted to crying before her shifts.
She’s not fine.
And I don’t know how to help them both without falling apart myself.
Add to that my husband — spiraling a bit as he approaches 65 — and suddenly I’ve become the family’s emotional ground wire. I don’t always feel up to the job.
So this week, I did what I sometimes do when I’m overwhelmed.
I asked for help from the other side.
Maybe it’s magical thinking. Maybe it’s spiritual bypassing. Maybe it’s just a mother’s way of saying, I need help, and no one living seems to have any to give.
But I turned to my daughter — the one I lost — and to my father, who’s also gone, and I said:
Help me. I’m drowning a little. I need something to go right.
And something did.
We’d recently bought a new car to help with my daughter’s move, and the dealership was supposed to send the title to our DMV. A month passed. No title. No updates. My husband left voicemail after voicemail. Nothing.
That morning, I was writing my morning pages as he vented in the background. I paused mid-sentence and scribbled:
Dad, Lil — help us get that title today, please.
An hour later, my husband called the dealership again. This time, the general manager answered. He walked back to the finance office and said, “The title is sitting right here on someone’s desk. It’s been here for over a month.”
He overnighted it. We had it the next day.
That same night, I asked again — this time for help finding a cheap flight to visit our daughter. We’d promised to visit once a month so she wouldn’t feel so alone, but her schedule had just come out and flights were absurd: six hundred dollars and up.
I whispered the same request. Please help me make this work.
A few hours later, I found one — two hundred dollars, last-minute, almost too good to be true. I booked it immediately and whispered thank you to whoever is still watching out for us.
This week, I was the mother who had to let go of her grown children — again.
I was the wife of a man grappling with his age.
I was the woman who still grieves her daughter every single day.
But I was also the one who asked for help — and received it.
Maybe grief opens a door to something softer. Maybe when your heart is cracked open, it becomes easier to ask for help — and easier to notice when it arrives.