I Scheduled a Meeting on My Mom's Death Date — and I Didn't Even Notice
Reflections from an overstimulated griefy girl
Today caught me completely off guard.
I was doing the classic solopreneur shuffle — juggling five things at once, bouncing between emails, trying to carve out time for a colleague between the chaos that is my calendar. I was the one who threw out the date. Distracted, moving fast, not thinking twice about it.
It wasn’t until I sat down to actually build the calendar invite that I realized: I had just proposed to meet on the anniversary of my mom’s death.
My first thought? How the f*ck did I miss this?
And then, almost immediately, came the spiral: What does that mean? Why would I do that? Am I an asshole? Does this mean I’m forgetting her? This was the worst day of my life — and now it’s a 30-minute Google Meet?
My first instinct was guilt. But almost as quickly, I knew what I needed to do: I opened my notes app and started writing.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The more I talk about losing her, the more I find comfort not in mourning that she’s gone — but in living like her. The day she died is a bookend. The way she lived is the story. And that story? I can carry it into every future chapter of my life, if I let myself.
As someone who built an entire platform around grief and loss, I’ve sometimes felt like I needed to stay close to the acute, raw pain in order to be relatable. Like I had to keep one foot permanently in the hardest version of it.
As someone who built an entire platform around grief and loss, I’ve sometimes felt like I needed to stay close to the acute, raw pain in order to be relatable. Like I had to keep one foot permanently in the hardest version of it.
But lately, I’m realizing something that might actually be more relatable: the quiet numbness. The grief that doesn’t consume you anymore, but still rattles you the moment you stumble into it. The thousands of people living untethered, wondering — now what? They still want to honor who they lost. They just don’t always know how to do that while also being fully alive.
We talk a lot about the ugly, ugly parts of grief — and they’re real, and they matter. But there are also these quieter moments. The kind where grief slips your mind for weeks, and then one random Tuesday, a calendar invite reminds you of everything.
That’s what I want Get Griefy to make room for — all of it. The shattering days and the numb ones. The raw grief and the version that’s learning, slowly, how to live alongside loss instead of underneath it.
Because life is still worth living — even on the days that used to break you.
Get Griefy Magazine is normalizing the conversation around grief and loss — refreshingly, honestly, and yes, with our whole chest: joyfully. We're making space for all of it. Have something to share? Submit your story.
