Grief Delayed

And there it was. Suddenly. All at once.

Two weeks ago my mom died.

For the last few weeks of her life, caring for her was essentially my full-time daytime occupation. My days revolved around hospital visits, then eventually being present with her at home while on Hospice care, engaging in final conversations, medications, meals, and simply being present. Some of my most treasured memories from those final days are the quietest ones: lying beside her in her hospital bed, talking, resting, watching the rise and fall of her chest.

At the same time, I was preparing to perform in a musical. Every spare moment was devoted to memorizing lines, learning songs, rehearsing choreography. My evenings belonged to rehearsals. My days belonged to my mother.

I was exhausted. But I didn’t realize it. Some mix of adrenaline and purpose must have kept me going.

And yet now, with both of those things suddenly over, I find myself missing them both in a way that knots up my gut.

The day after Mom died, I stepped on stage and performed. The show ran through the weekend. There was no time to think very much. There were costumes to put on, cues to hit, nerves to calm, songs to sing. I very intentionally left Christy Berghoef outside the theater where only my character, George Sand was permitted inside. I somehow even managed to get through a solo that rose out of the grief of losing my lover, Chopin, without allowing Christy’s grief to interfere and collapse me on stage. Being in this production was one of the greatest thrills of my life. Kneeling at mom’s bedside, was one of the most sacred experiences of my life.

Now the show is over. Mom is gone. The rehearsals have ended. The hospital bed has been removed from the farmhouse. The script has been put away. And the grief I barely had room for has begun arriving all at once.

People sometimes imagine grief as one overwhelming event. My experience has been different. During those final weeks there was simply too much to do. Love demanded action. The musical demanded attention. Every hour had a purpose and I devoted myself fully to all of it.

Now the busyness is gone, and I wonder if it was protecting me from the full weight of what was coming. Because the tears are suddenly very close to the surface at all times and running over when I least expect it- as I search for a new hose nozzle at Ace Hardware or transplant tomato plants into the garden beds, or peruse the produce at Aldi.

The urge to cry seems to arrive out of nowhere. Not because something new has happened, but because perhaps I finally have enough stillness to feel what has already happened.

The strange thing is that I am not lacking responsibilities. While I did clear most of my traveling, speaking and book events for the summer as soon as Mom began Hospice care and we thought she had months left, it’s not as if my calendar is suddenly empty and I am left alone with grief. Quite the opposite.

My garden was almost completely neglected this spring. There are book clubs visiting my secret garden this summer and garden clubs coming over in a summer when things out back seem more neglected than they have ever been. Anyone who gardens knows spring is not a season you can postpone. It is the time for pulling weeds, preparing beds, planting seeds in the greenhouse, getting everything ready for the months ahead.

While I was caring for my mother, the season moved forward without me. Now I walk outside and see everything that should have been done. The weeds. The beds. The trimming. The overwhelming unfinished work.

But instead of feeling motivated, I feel almost paralyzed. Have to force myself to do the work I have always enjoyed.

Not because the gardening tasks are impossible, but because they all seem to arrive carrying the added weight of grief.

There is also my parents’ forty acre flower farm, a place that has been in the family for generations and is filled with generations of possessions that need sifting through. There are memories, hard decisions, and responsibilities that now suddenly belong to my brothers and I.

There is the next book spinning in my head, waiting to be written. I had set it aside during these intense weeks, fully expecting to pick it back up afterward. Eager to do so. But “afterward” has arrived, and I find I have almost no energy for it yet. The thought of writing it makes me feel nauseous.

Every task in front of me feels larger than it actually is. Every responsibility feels heavier than it should. I keep looking at my to-do list as though it belongs to someone else.

The work remains. The energy does not. During those last weeks, my world became very small. Not small in importance. Small in focus. There was my mother. There was the musical. There was the next thing that needed doing.

Meanwhile the world beyond those responsibilities kept spinning. The headlines kept arriving. The political turmoil continued. The things that concerned me before still existed. I just wasn’t looking at them very much.

Love and duty had narrowed my field of vision. But now the field has widened again.

Alongside the grief, alongside the neglected garden and the family responsibilities and the unwritten book, I find myself face to face once more with a world that often feels unstable and exhausting.

Perhaps this is one of grief’s less discussed realities. The world does not pause when someone dies. The weeds keep growing. The garden season advances. The worlds keeps on spinning. Books still need writing. Farms still need tending. The mail still arrives.

Life continues presenting its demands even while part of you is standing beside a hospital bed saying goodbye.

I think I expected that once the crisis was over, I would simply return to normal life. “Back in the saddle again,” as they say. Instead, I am discovering that grief has its own timetable. The caregiving is finished. The funeral is over. The musical has closed. And only now am I beginning to feel the weight of what happened. That Mom’s body is in the ground. That I will never hear her voice again, will never see her smile light up every room she walked in. That I no longer have parents in this world.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here for you. I don’t have a lesson about resilience today. I don’t have five helpful tips for navigating loss.

What I have is a neglected garden, a farm bursting with memories, a blank page waiting for a book I cannot yet bring myself to write, and a heart and body that feel far more tired than I ever imagined or expected they could.

What I have is the growing realization that busyness can sometimes carry us through a tragedy, but eventually it hands us back to ourselves. And there, waiting patiently, is the grief. And that grief cannot be walked around forever. It eventually has to be entered and walked through.

Perhaps what I need right now is not more productivity. Perhaps what I need is permission to cry. Permission to move slowly for just a bit. Permission to admit that losing a mother changes the weight of everything for a while.

The weeds will still be there tomorrow. The book can wait another day. For now, I am learning to sit with the loss. And that, it turns out, is work too.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.