When the silence is the loudest thing in the room

It has been 16 months since my Mother died and slowly but surely my family and I have been healing. Seemingly at the same pace.

In the last year we experienced all of our first’s without Mum. We spoke about her liberally and she came up in all of the prayers before meals but then, almost overnight, we stopped talking about her. Mum doesn’t appear in our conversations when we are together anymore, apart from funny anecdotes. During Christmas she didn’t come up at all in any conversation I was a part of, nor did she today during our dinner for my Mum and Dad’s wedding anniversary.

It would seem as though we all, at the same time, just stopped talking to each other about our Mum and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just too hard to. I know I try and avoid the topic where possible and it hard to admit that that’s the case. How can someone’s memory live on if the people who are in charge of it don’t talk about it anymore?

I know it seems it but I am not that upset, just astonished by the phenomenon. I know we are all thinking about her, constantly but even my Dad barely utters her name anymore. Is this normal? Is this part of the grief process or part of the moving on process?

If I was to give my own personal take on why Mum no longer is part of my regular topic of discussion it’s because I am not actually past it or OK with it. How does someone just go away like that? How does someone just stop existing? How is someone there one day but not the next? How do you recieve a text one day but are unable to provide the reply?

Accepting death is not possible in my opinion, we simply don’t understand it enough to really properly embrace it as living beings. It’s just a process of surviving through it really and obviously based on my family’s unanimous silence around the topic I am not alone in this process of survival.

I still think about Mum every single day as I know my sister’s and of course (and especially) my Dad does. If there is the slightest possibility that she can see and hear us, I hope she knows that the silence is not a reflection on her impact on our lives, if anything it is the very opposite.

The silence is really the loudest thing in the room at the moment.