I gave birth to two children.  I am ‘mama fish’ to many more. Friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, that my own children have brought home and I have adopted like rescue puppies.  Our home was filled with a variety of personalities that sat at our kitchen island. I would feed them, listen to their dreams, their drama, and their hopes.   I keep in touch with them to this day.  They have all grown into beautiful young adults experiencing life in ways unique to them and I relish in their shared stories.

This week, as I was shopping at Safeway, my daughter called me in hysterics. She asked if I was sitting down. No, I was pushing my cart of food, mask on, in a hurry to finish. She blurted out that one of these boys, one she had dated and stayed in touch with as friends, was found dead.

The floor came up to meet me. I gasped. I moved my cart to an aisle where no one was in so I could take off my mask. “What the hell?” I asked…I needed to rehear it.  How does this happen? How can this loving child be gone? How did this happen to someone so young?  How did we not know? How…

I think that how is where grief is born. It is the word that we utter as the pain and confusion of this reality arrives and the need to understand becomes a basic priority.  It is what our brain needs to know to face what is happening.  We want this word answered as if in some way, answering it could change things. The answer might bring hope and a clue to fix this. And yet, when a child dies, the how…every how to this question brings only one truth.  Your child is dead.

Our heart is more complicated and less accepting. It doesn’t care of the how. It asks why.  And it is the answer to this question that seals our fate as a grief warrior. The answer to the why is a never-ending question we keep reliving because we know how but we will never be able to understand why.