Tessa, when I described this to her, said: ‘Grief doesn’t have to be proportional to the specific loss to be real.’ I wrote that down. I still have it somewhere.
I also had, during this period, good days that felt almost guilty. Days when I went to work and the day was interesting and I helped someone figure out a scheduling conflict and I came home and made something I actually wanted to eat and watched something I wanted to watch and went to sleep without waking up at three AM. Days when the whole situation with my mother was a background hum rather than the loudest thing in the room. I allowed myself those days. I think you have to.
## What Denise Was Managing
I should be honest about something I know and have thought about, which is that my mother was managing something real when she did this. I am not saying that to excuse it. I’m saying it because the story that makes her a cartoon villain is not the true story, and the true story is both worse and more comprehensible than the cartoon version.
My mother has been, for the last decade, a woman alone. My father left when she was forty-nine, which is a specific kind of hard. She had built her life around an architecture that assumed two incomes and a partner, and suddenly she had one income and a house that felt too big and a social world that was built around couple-hood in a way she had never noticed before she was no longer part of a couple. She did not handle this by falling apart dramatically. She handled it by being fine. She appeared fine. She told everyone she was fine. She did not ask for help because asking for help would have meant acknowledging that she was not fine, and that acknowledgment was, to her, worse than the actual problem.