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Key points
- Grief triggers are like sneaker waves; they hit you when your back is turned.
- Grief triggers can be as non-specific as the change in seasons, or as specific as a favorite perfume.
- Knowing your triggers is the first step in managing them.
- Triggered grief can also release involuntary memories that can later bring comfort.
This past weekend, my newsfeed filled up with photos of my friends’ girls for International Daughters Day. I loved seeing all their faces. They made me smile.
At the end of the day, though, I was exhausted and out of sorts. I tried to distract myself with books, then with ice cream. I wondered why I was sad. Finally, I set off on my daily walk, and it hit me.
Seeing photos of my friends’ kids hadn’t bothered me in previous years. But this year was different. This is the year I lost my mother.
I am my mother’s only daughter. Or is it, was? I still can’t think of her in the past tense. I miss her every day, the way her hands danced and fluttered when she spoke, her voice when she’d call to alert me to some documentary about penguins or parrots on television just then, the cards, stuffed with clippings, that she’d send me in the mail on a near-weekly basis.
In her last years, dementia crept up on her, but she still loved celebrating every holiday with family. Daughters Day hadn’t been invented when I was growing up. She never knew it existed, but I have no doubt that had she known, I would have gotten the card to match.
How grief triggers work
This is how grief triggers work. They are sneaker waves that slam you when your back is turned. There is seldom any warning.
Sometimes, they are as non-specific as the way the light hits the underside of leaves at a certain time of year or the first sound of lawnmowers in the spring. These are the stealthiest ones, the ones that make us hyper-aware of the passage of time and those not there to share it.
Other times, though, grief triggers are highly specific, cued by places, objects, or scents unique to the person who’s gone. A whiff of “Youth Dew” perfume instantly transports me back to when I was a child and would watch my mom get dressed up for dinner out with my dad. She would spritz in my direction, and I’d go to bed that night wrapped in a sweet sillage of musk and vanilla.
When I smell lilacs, I see my mom reaching to cut them from the old tree that grew along the fence at her home of nearly 50 years. I think of her when I smell the lemon loaf that accompanied our weekly teas in her later years. Now an unexpected encounter with any of these scents fills me with a deep ache, not just for the past but for her.
Old triggers versus new
I am not new to grief triggers.
I lost my 7-year-old son Christopher more than two decades ago. In the first years after he died, I would have a panic attack when a yellow school bus drove by. The buses would reappear with the turning of the leaves for the start of each school year, and my body would go into fight-or-flight mode, trying to protect me from drowning in a flash flood of grief.
There were other triggers. Christopher, who was deaf, was born with failing kidneys. When he was 6 years old, he received a kidney transplant from his dad, and suddenly he was making up for all the time he’d spent in hospitals over the years. He played for hours on the old steam train at Travel Town in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, near where we lived. He learned to ride horses in a special program to rebuild his strength and balance, showing off his tricks like a little rodeo clown. The first time he hit a softball off a tee, my heart soared as though he’d knocked it out of Dodger Stadium.
One day, we passed a field of children playing. He tugged my arm and pointed to them and then himself. “Same,” he signed.
After his death, the smell of baseball glove leather, or hay in a stable, or the rumble of a train going by could collapse my lungs and send my heart racing.
But these triggers are known to me now, well-worn neural pathways. I may not know when I will be triggered, but I do know what to do when it happens. I take walks. I call friends. I breathe through the pain.
I’ve learned to live with the old triggers, even welcome them for the memories that come flooding back along with the emotions. Now, when I see a yellow school bus go by, I also picture Christopher clambering off, waving his Batman lunch box and signing, “School finished” with a flourish. The memory makes me smile.
With my mom, though, the triggers are not yet known to me. I’m discovering them, one at a time. I’ve braced for the obvious ones—Mother’s Day, her birthday, the upcoming anniversary of her death. But Daughters Day I didn’t see coming, nor the first time I heard someone call her name and looked up half expecting her to come around the corner, nor the first time I reached for a card I knew she’d love before remembering that she was gone.
I am having to learn all over again how to handle triggers.
The gift of involuntary memory
This time, though, I have the past to draw on. Dealing with old triggers has taught me something: In addition to intense grief, these triggers can also produce involuntary memories. Somehow the process of churning up those feelings also prompts spontaneous recall of events I didn’t know I’d forgotten, ones I hadn’t thought about in years, or decades, or maybe even ever.
These involuntary memories, in turn, trigger others until they form a chain of links back to the person and the past. Now when sadness starts to pull me under, I try to focus instead on the memories that come surging to the surface. It’s how I bring my loved ones back to me, if only for an instant. It is the only way I know to travel through time. Each time I discover a new trigger with my mom, I try to map it in my mind to a memory I can turn to later.
When I was in college, my grandmother died. I remember the drawn look on my mother’s face when she told me the news, her shock, even as an adult, of feeling orphaned in middle age. She pulled me close and whispered into my hair: “No one loves you like your mother.” I remember thinking she was talking about her own mom back then. Now, I think she was talking to me.
I hold onto that now, in the wake of Daughters Day. I can’t celebrate with my mom, but I can celebrate being her daughter. I go and fix a cup of tea and slice some lemon loaf. That’s what she would have done.
