Am I Grieving the Right Way?

Photo by Steven Roe on Scopio

In October 2020, my mom died from COVID. It was a sudden death, exacerbated by her COPD and recent bout with pneumonia. In the past year and a half, I have learned to talk about her in the past tense, focusing on the facts of her death and its relationship to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have also died from COVID. For the first few months after her death, it was all I could do not to cry in my apartment. Eventually, those…