Letting Go: Grief is Like a Hall of Mirrors

After the article two weeks ago, I owe you an answer about my mum. She died last Saturday.

The sequence of events is crisp in my memory, as if trauma burns things in with unusual clarity. The cardiac arrest. The reanimation. The slow understanding that the process had damaged her brain beyond recovery. The coma from which she would never wake. The conversations with doctors, the weight of those conversations, the helplessness of standing beside her bed in the intensive care unit knowing that nothing, no amount of determination, no quick decision, no well-meaning action could bring her back.

Last Friday evening, we made a decision together with the doctors. My father, my sister, the medical team, and years of conversations Mum had shared with us about what she absolutely did not want. A life suspended by machines, conscious choice removed, dignity traded for extensions. She had been so crystal clear about this. Being kept alive by machines is exactly what she did not want.

On Friday night, the machines came off. I was with her until her last breath, early on Saturday morning.

This is not how I thought I would describe something this final. But I am learning, slowly, that the most honest thing you can do is say it plainly. She died. The words sit heavy. They are true. I have no better way to soften them, and they do not need softening.

The Intensity of the Week After

The days that followed were a strange mixture of necessity and numbness. I learned that grief is not a straight line. It is more like walking a hall of mirrors in an amusement park. You can see the exit clearly ahead of you, and you walk forward with something like readiness. Suddenly you run into a mirror wall, and the emotions hit you. And in this moment - woosh - the grief finds you again, fresh and abrupt, as if you had not already understood that she was gone.

You walk further, emotions soften again. Then you think you have passed through it and suddenly you hear this one song on the radio. "My Way," Frank Sinatra singing about a life lived on one's own terms. Her song! Suddenly you are back in tears.

You are remembering her laugh. A specific moment at a dinner table. The particular way she listened when you spoke, as if every word you said mattered. You keep walking, keep turning corners, and grief keeps appearing.

There is Also the Practical Grief.

The organizing. The funeral arrangements. The invitations to design. The priest to meet. The logistics of saying goodbye in Germany, where we gather after the funeral for coffee and memories. Where everyone comes together afterward and celebrates the person we have lost. Where we sit around tables and share stories, some funny, some tender, some painful.

Friendships which Matter

Many people made themselves heard during this week. Emails arrived. Messages on WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram. Old friends surfaced after years of silence. New friends, and people we have met only during our eighteen months of travel sent their condolences.

Some simply said they were thinking of us. Some shared stories of Mum. Some sent flowers. Some sat in the chairs behind us during the ceremony.

This is when you learn something true about friendship. Not the kind of friendship you read about in travel blogs. Not the exciting kind, the ones connected to adventures and new landscapes. But the real kind. The kind that shows up when something breaks.

What Stays When You Go

Travel teaches you many things. It teaches you that beauty is everywhere if you look for it. That people are mostly kind. That distance can open your mind. That routines can be rewritten. That you need far less than you thought you did.

But something else comes later, after you have been away for long enough, after you have learned to live with fewer things and more landscapes. You learn that …

Life is a journey. And sometimes the journey is not about meeting new people. Sometimes it is about the people who show up. The people who are there when you come back, even if only for two weeks, even if just for a funeral.

Safe Travels and Goodbye Mum

She lived her way. She died her way. And in doing so, she taught everyone sitting around those tables after the funeral what it really means to matter to someone. Not to write about them later. Not to photograph them for the story. But to be there. To show up. To sit down. To carry her forward through the memories we share. That is presence. That is love.

I am Learning to Carry This.

The grief, the gratitude for the friendships that emerged, the unexpected closeness with family that loss creates. I am learning that you do not need to know what to say. You just need to be willing to sit quietly with someone and give him a hug.

This is my way of saying thank you to all of you who made themselves heard. Safe travels, wherever you are.

And if someone who matters to you is grieving, call them. Send a message. If you can, show up. Sit down. Stay a while.