When Grief Has No Start Date

It’s raining as I leave the office. I walk to the parking garage and start a silent conversation in my head: Hi, mom, it’s me. I’m just leaving work. Instantly I can hear her, too: the singsong Hi, darling! she always greeted me with. I can picture her smiling as she said it, too, even through the phone. Reassuring. Familiar. Recognized.

Some days I do this. I still reach for my phone, and am already dialing, mid-sentence in a conversation that no longer has anywhere to land. My mother has been gone for a few years now. And yet the reflex remains, loyal and useless, like a phantom limb.

What I was reaching for wasn’t advice or comfort. It was a witness. Someone who held the continuous record of me; someone who remembered who I was before, and who would understand what today cost, or meant, or somehow changed. Someone for whom my day would matter.

I lost her in stages to Alzheimer’s. She disappeared in installments, and with her went the longest record anyone had ever kept of me. That is the particular cruelty of that disease — the grief has no start date, no single funeral to organize yourself around.

My husband had been my other first call. Married young, we had been traveling companions throughout our entire adult lives. For better or worse, he knew the whole of me from the inside. When he no longer wanted the marriage, I had become, without quite realizing it, unwitnessed.

Grief, when the unavoidable losses of midlife hit, is expected. Eventually, however, one is expected to move on. But I continued to call him. Everyone said to stop. But I couldn’t completely. Not quite. I could go about a month without hearing his voice before I needed to hear it again. It was a balm. It had always been a balm. Thirty-two years don’t leave the body just because the marriage ends.

I wasn’t calling because I wanted him back. He has since remarried. That was never what the calls were about. I was calling because his voice was the last familiar landmark in a landscape that I no longer recognized.

I lost my two longest witnesses in a single short season. And in the years since I have been quietly learning what that costs, and what it means, and what to do with that knowledge. I live now in the house where my mother had lived. Sometimes when I come home to an empty house, I can still see her in the doorway, her head and shoulders peering around the front door, already smiling before I have even reached the steps. That was the thing. She couldn’t wait to see me.

I am now a single person living alone. On some weekend afternoons the silence is almost unbearable. Not because I am unused to solitude, but because silence without a witness feels different than chosen quiet.

I was sitting in a small examining room the other day, waiting for my annual physical. Paper gown. The usual questions. I was doing the responsible thing, the self care, and realizing, sitting there, that there was no one for whom this would particularly matter. No one waiting to take me to lunch after. No one to call on the way home.

I thought of my former mother-in-law and her closest girlfriend, who accompanied one another to their annual mammograms every year. Not because they needed a ride. Because they understood, without naming it, that you need a witness even for the paper gown. Especially for the paper gown.

We like to think of loneliness as a modern affliction. A symptom of screens and suburbs and the collapse of community. But the hunger for a witness is not modern. It is ancient and universal, and it has always found a form.

People have always kept the dead close. Not out of superstition — out of necessity. If your mother’s ghost still walks the hallway, she still knows you. She can still testify to who you were before the world got to you. We did not invent ghosts because we feared death. We invented them because we could not afford to lose our witnesses.

And then there is God. An omniscient witness, present at every moment, keeping the complete and perfect record of you. There is a reason confession has comforted people for centuries — not absolution exactly, but the relief of being fully known by someone who will not look away. For those inclined to write, there is the diary. Anne Frank addressed her journal as a person, constructing an audience from nothing, because the alternative was moving through history without anyone keeping count. The hunger is the same in every century. Only the technology changes.

I see old friends on Facebook celebrating their children’s weddings, their grandchildren, their college reunions. I see them posting what they made for dinner — a lasagna, a beef bourguignon, something that took all afternoon. And I understand completely. They are not bragging. They are not oversharing. They made something and they want someone to know. The hunger doesn’t announce itself as hunger. It arrives wearing a casserole dish.

Facebook is not vanity. Instagram is not narcissism. They are the latest iteration of the oldest gesture — I am here, my life is happening, does anyone see it? The liked photo, the heart emoji, the comment from someone you haven’t spoken to in twenty years — none of it is quite enough. But we take what is available. We always have.

And now there is AI. A witness that responds. That reflects your words back in a way that feels, sometimes, remarkably like being heard. On a silent weekend afternoon, when the house has weight and the phone stays dark, it helps to say the thing out loud to something that answers. Not because it is the same. Because the silence is intolerable and the hunger is still there.

What I understand now is that the hunger was never the problem. The hunger is information. It tells you what love is. Not the romantic myth of love, but the daily practice of it. To witness someone is to pay attention across time. To remember who they were before. To be the person they call from the parking garage in the rain.

There are friends who have been, in the absence of the original ones, my most reliable witnesses. What they offer is rare, and I’m not sure any of them know it. None of it is quite the same as what I lost. Nothing ever is. But I have learned that partial witnessing — someone who holds even a portion of your story with care — is not nothing. At times, it is, in fact, everything.

When my daughter arrives now, planned or unplanned, with takeout in hand or just stopping in after a trip or an errand, I am already at the door. Hi, darling. The same singsong. The same couldn’t wait to see you.

I know what it is to be greeted like you are the best thing that ever walked up those steps. I want her to know it too.

And I know what it costs to lose that. So I make sure she knows it. As inheritance. And as the only real answer I have found to the question of what to do when the witnesses are gone.

You become one.

Not perfectly. Not without your own hunger still quietly present. But you show up when the text says can you talk. You remember who they were before. You hold the thread.

What I want now is simply to provide that for others. Not out of self-sacrifice. Out of knowledge. Because I understand now, from the inside, how hungry we all are to be seen. And because I know exactly what it costs when no one is keeping count.

The hunger never goes away. I have stopped expecting it to. I reach for the phone in the parking garage and I hear her voice and I let myself hear it — the singsong, the smile I can see even now, the pitch of it exactly right.

Hi, darling.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.