May is a Complicated Month

May is a tricky month for grief and me.

My mom died in 2007. May was her birth month. It’s also Mother’s Day. And my maternal grandmother, Grandma Becky, died in May two years before my mom did. So every year, May arrives and it’s not just spring. It’s like a carnival funhouse, laughter around one corner, jumpscare around the next.

I don’t say that to be dramatic. It’s just the truth of how grief works. You can be fine for months and then a date on the calendar, a song on the radio, or the smell of something blooming can pull you right back into it. Not in a falling-apart way, necessarily. Sometimes in a quiet way. A heaviness in your chest that you carry around all day without quite naming it. Sometimes, for me, it’s a laugh when my naughty kitten does something my mom would call karma. Or a longing for the feel of Grandma Becky patting the bottoms of my feet absentmindedly.

I have a tradition in May. Between Mother’s Day and my mom’s birthday, I gift little lilac bush babies anonymously. Lilacs were her favorite flower. Just a plant and a note with a quote from one of her many favorite songs. This year it’ll probably be “Cock-Eyed Optimist” from South Pacific, which is so perfectly my mother that it makes me laugh and hurt in my heart at the same time. She was stubbornly hopeful. The kind of person who could find something good in the worst day you’ve ever had. Sometimes that felt like exactly what you needed. Sometimes it felt patronizing, or willfully naive. She was very different from her mother in that way. But when you pushed back, she’d just shrug and say “I’d rather see the world through rose-colored glasses than shit-brown ones.” And honestly? I can’t argue with that logic.

My mom and I had a complicated relationship. Love was without question, but we were very different in so many ways. She caught flies with honey, I rocked the boat. She loved the feeling of falling in love, I seek contentment and calm comfort. But she also taught me to wish on stars, to see the beauty of the moon, and to trust in my gut always. I often joke that I’m a genetic combination of Snow White and George Carlin, and there are many times I find myself wondering if my mom would be proud of the way I’ve come to balance those different pieces of myself. I know my grandmother would be. And it’s in those moments that I often get the scent of lilacs, or the warmth I used to get when she would give me the glow of her full smile. And that’s when I know she would be proud.

My mom loved lilacs because of the smell, and the memories they brought her of her own grandmother and Aunt Martha. I remember once she told me they smelled like love. So gifting them to strangers who’ll never know why a little plant showed up is a way of keeping her alive in the world in a form that grows and blooms and smells like the thing that made her feel closest to the people she loved. But the act of giving them is for me. That feels right.

I’m also out in the garden a lot in May. Hands in the dirt, surrounded by herbs and flowers. The smell of rosemary and soil, seeing the new blooms pushing through, feeling the spring sun on my skin. It’s comforting in a way I can’t fully explain, especially because neither my mom nor Grandma Becky were gardeners. My affection for the dirt and the planting is a gift from my grandfather, but the ritual of grounding my grief through it is my own.

And I think that’s the thing about grief that people don’t always give themselves permission to do: build your own rituals. Find your own ways. I have two older sisters, and none of us grieve in the same way. We’ve each found our own paths in life and in grief. Your grief is yours. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It doesn’t even have to match the people who lost the same person you did. And it definitely doesn’t have to look like something the person you lost would have done. My mom didn’t garden. She didn’t choose dirt under her fingernails to grieve her own mother or Aunt Martha. But this isn’t her grief. It’s mine. And she doesn’t get to edit it from wherever she is. None of us know the exact way our legacy will live on. But it does. I may ground my grief in nature, but the legacy my mother left lives on in the moments that her little sayings or quirks are passed along by someone whose life she touched, maybe without even realizing it.

My mom and Grandma Becky didn’t leave me roadmaps for missing them. But May still brings them close, whether I’m ready for it or not.

Grief doesn’t need to consume you to be real. It doesn’t need to knock you flat every time to count. Sometimes it’s a heaviness you carry gently. Sometimes it’s a lilac bush on a stranger’s porch. Sometimes it’s the smell of rosemary on your hands at the end of the day and a feeling you can’t name but don’t want to let go of.

Just as my grief is mine, not theirs, so is my method for letting it exist within me without consuming me. Yours can be yours too.

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