Grief, Love, and the Art of Letting Go

By Day Schildkret, artist and author, https://www.morningaltars.com/

My heart is torn.

That’s how it felt after the last trip to see my mother.

Dementia is taking her down such a winding path. She wanders between being verbal and non-verbal, making sense and nonsense, being here and being gone.

She is long past the days of forgetting my name – these days, she forgets her own.

As her inner world consumes her, my own grief is consuming me. My grief doesn’t always look like sorrow, however. Sometimes it resembles longing and wonder, often anger and woe, but always, always love.

More and more, I feel the threads of our connection thinning. This is what really hurts. Phones are useless. Talking is impossible. The only way she can feel me is in the flesh, hand in hand, physically tethered together, like we once were. 

But living on opposite ends of the country makes the physical contact sporadic. And so I often find myself reaching out through song and often singing them into the virtual void, hoping that some part of her is still able to hear it and can somehow bring her back.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” but by the time I get to “please don’t take my sunshine away,” she’s gone, and it’s just me singing to myself.

Dementia is an isolating and heartbreaking path for those of us walking our loved ones through it. As they gradually slip into an unreachable elsewhere, the bond we share feels as if it’s unraveling thread by thread, as we grasp at whatever is graspable.

Personally, I need to feel held tightly, both physically and emotionally. I want to feel my close friendships steadying me so that I can continue to steady my mom. Yet, over time, their holding is slacking too. 

At the beginning, there was more attending to me and my heart, but these days, it’s rare that a friend even asks about my mother – it’s as if she’s already gone. Even more rare are questions about how I am doing carrying this burden myself. And, while I get how unsexy dementia is as a conversation for brunch, when it’s not invited in, some part of me is left out.

When I returned home from New York, my heart was truly threadbare. Life wanted to just carry on – birthday parties, work meetings, Saturday errands – but I kept feeling somewhere else, kind of like what ethnographer Victor Turner refers to as a “transitional being,” neither here nor there. And no matter how much I tried to portray a normal façade, I needed to be seen in this, to be witnessed within this never-ending story of loss.

Transitions, witnessing, and heartbreak are ritual’s terrain, and I knew I needed one.

As I was unpacking from my trip, I noticed my mom’s old raccoon fur coat in the back of my closet. This is a family heirloom and a gift my mother received from my great-grandfather, an immigrant and furrier. This coat carries the fingerprint of my mom – her name is embroidered in its lining, the smell still carries the scent of her perfume, and a pocket holds an old button from an old blouse. Holding and smelling it, I’m transported to my childhood.

But just like my mother, this coat is coming undone. When I pulled it from the closet and held it up, my fingers traced the frayed lining of its hem, the loose threads a quiet echo of my mom’s unraveling. It needed mending – and, truthfully, so did I. 

Then an idea came: What if I told my mother’s story through the story of this coat? And what if, by repairing it, I could symbolically begin to stitch my heart back together again?

Moments later, I put out an invitation to my close friends: “I need you,” I wrote. “I just saw my mom, and she barely recognizes me. I’m realizing I need to share what it’s been like to lose her, to find a new way to carry this grief. I need to tell my story and feel better tracked. Will you gather around me?”

A week later, twelve of my friends sat on my living room rug, their eyes holding steady as I shared the story that had been unraveling inside me. It was raw, exposed, and achingly incomplete – there was no catharsis, nothing healed or fixed. Just me, revealing how threadbare it all was.

At the end of my story, I took out the fur, a needle, and thread. “This coat,” I said, “is as undone as I feel. I want to invite you to help mend it – and me. As you sew a single stitch into its lining, offer a blessing for my time with my mom. Remind me that I am not alone in this.”

One by one, the coat passed between us, each person stitching the coat with meaning. When the coat returned to my hands, it felt heavier somehow, weighted with connection. It was no longer just my mother’s coat; it was now a storied coat, stitched with grief, friendship, and love – her story, my story, and ours, woven together as she fades away.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.