This post is for someone out there who is dealing with trauma grief, and for the one whose Google search “what it’s like to find out your loved one had a severe untreated mental illness after they’re dead” and turned up with nothing. Courage, my friend. You’re not alone.

Grief sure is a funny, fickle animal. It took my mom passing away and me getting into therapy to realize 1) she had a severe mental illness that should have had ongoing treatment and monitoring, and 2) she was my actual abuser and not my dad, like she pretended. So basically everything I had learned about life, including who my mom was – I found out, with utter shock and horror, that it was completely wrong.

Being a person who needs words to process things, I have been trying to describe that feeling for literally years. This poem comes closest.

Developing

When I discovered you had schizophrenia,
after you were long dead, it was like
someone poured acid
over every memory-photograph,
filled up the room inside my mind that was marked
“Mother” on the door
with so much bleach that the pictures
were all washed white.

Then a monster materialized on the blanks
and set up camp. For ten years
your delusions eclipsed you.
Ten years I could not enter that room,
nor touch your memory.

I stayed locked out,
banished from a place in my own mind until
finally, one day I tried the door again,
and found it unlocked.
Then one at a time, little things began to reappear.
Glimpses of you:
a smile here, a laugh there that was musical
and not maniacal.

Perhaps one day, your image will emerge again
like a photograph immersed in acid for developing –
the kind that creates,
instead of destroying.