how does grief look?

as i said in my post the other day, one of the things i've been thinking about is the individual nature of grief. and how grief hits you at the strangest moments and in the strangest ways. 

maybe it's just autumn, and the changing of the seasons, but i think it started a few weeks ago. i went to a gourmet knitting day that someone i know holds regularly. she's an amazing knitter and even participated in the knitting equivalent of the great british baking show. only knitting. and in denmark. and since i eternally hope to learn to knit and i like food, i went. so there, in a room full of knitters, i found myself talking about my mom's alzheimer's and how on some level i hadn't forgiven her for it. 

i know how terrible that sounds.

but there you have it.

and i found myself explaining to them the way we found, at the height of my realization of how bad it was with mom in 2016, what we thought were dad's bowling balls in mom's car and discovered instead that it was a case full of pistols and a case full of ammo. and how i still feel shocked by that. and unable to forgive her for what she could have done with those weapons. in that moment of finding them, i clearly saw in my mind's eye, my beautiful, amazing daughter, knocking on mom's door to visit her and mom not recognizing her in the throes of her diseased brain and taking one of those guns and shooting her own granddaughter. that didn't happen, but the fact that it could have takes my breath away, still to this day, as i write these words. and i can't forgive her for it. i can't forgive her cracked brain - for having all those guns, for loading them into her car, for the shooting of her granddaughter that she didn't do. and i can't forgive the state of south dakota for renewing her fucking permit to carry just days after they took her driver's license. what kind of a fucked up world do we live in that that's even possible.

the lovely knitting ladies were fascinated and horrified that such a thing could happen. it couldn't happen in denmark, that's for sure. and though i didn't know them, they listened to me and understood me and gave me space and that was a great deal of comfort that i'm not sure i've felt before. and i wonder if explaining it all in danish put me an emotional step away from it that helped me. and i think it may have been a baby step towards forgiving her, though i haven't done so yet.

i'm more certain than ever that this grief thing is a process and one of which we have very little control. 

but in the days since, i've felt pangs of missing mom. weirdly, mostly in connection with putting on my socks. which i realize also sounds weird. mom was a sock snob and i have a lot of her high end socks in my sock drawer. and enough time has passed that most of them are quite threadbare from wear and in recent weeks, i've felt sorrow about that. like when her socks are gone, she will really be gone. though she's been gone for more than two years now and because of the disease, she was gone for quite a lot longer than that. 

why does my grief manifest in a sock? i've got multiple pairs in my darning basket, but i've yet to darn them. would darning them darn my own soul? would it help? is this how my grief looks?

at least i feel i've stopped telling myself how my grief should look and started accepting how it looks. for me, in my own individual situation. right here and now.