One day, when my sister and I were young, she cut her knee on a piece of playground equipment. She screamed. I ran to her and looked at her leg, and for an instant there was no blood, just the white flesh angling down to the glutinous pad of her kneecap at the bottom of the wound. Then the bleeding started, our parents came running, my father scooped her up and we all went to the emergency room.

It was a clean cut, they said, easy to stitch up.

Some bereavements are clean cuts. While all loss is complex, those that fall within the boundaries of accepted narratives can be easier to navigate. I was nineteen when my father died. My son died when he was nineteen. I loved them both, they loved me, and I grieved their deaths. Everyone understood.

When you lose a beloved parent, child, or spouse, you step into a cultural framework people understand. The story of your loss is like a good house, a sturdy structure. It exists already and you just step into it and find shelter.

My friends and I joked with dark humor that I could play the dead kid card now, because the card meant something, it was currency. Almost every person who finds out that I lost a child gets the same expression. The conversation stops, for a moment, but it is a cultural hat tip to trauma. I see you, bereaved parent. That conversational hurdle is difficult, but it is comforting to be acknowledged.

I thought all bereavement was a clean cut until my mother died in 2022.

My mother was a difficult person, and we were estranged for most of my adult life. It took years to strangle the hope that she would change, that she would get therapy or find recovery or leverage another vector for self-awareness. She never did.

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