The Cost of Unspoken Names

 Grief does not arrive all at once, and it never comes in a single shape. It moves quietly, unexpectedly, and without a cure. Sometimes it waits years before tapping you on the shoulder again. I’ve learned that the only way to speak about it honestly is through self-disclosure, through telling the story the way it actually lived in my body.

The man I grew up knowing as my father loved me. His presence felt safe, steady, and nurturing. When he died, the pain ripped through my soul in a way I didn’t yet have language for. After his death, his name became something I could not speak. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I understood what would follow. I knew the rage that would surface if I mentioned him. So I swallowed it. I bottled everything in and learned silence as survival.

My relationship with my mother grew more complicated after that loss. She was a good person, and she loved me in her own way, but her pain often spilled into our home. She was the one who educated me, pushed me, and demanded excellence. My father nurtured me. That was the balance we once had. But alongside her expectations came fear. If I misspelled a word or forgot a definition, punishment followed. Extension cords. Tree branches. For a long time, I tried to explain it away by telling myself this behavior began after my father died, that grief had broken something in her. But memory does not lie. I remember these moments happening even before his untimely passing.

I don’t tell this story to paint her as a demon. I believe there was trauma living inside her long before it ever touched me. Knowing the mother she had, I can imagine the pressure of trying to be something, of keeping a facade just to survive. Nothing was ever good enough for her either, and that kind of upbringing leaves marks you don’t always recognize until they surface in harmful ways. I understand now that she was carrying expectations and wounds that were never hers to begin with. That generational connection is something I will share more deeply in another story, at another time.

As time passed, her anger hardened. She blamed him for choices that were ultimately her own. Before she died, I remember her pouring things over his pictures, destroying every image she could find. She had learned information that might have changed their lives if it had come sooner. But I often wonder if she thought of me in that moment, before she started burning pieces of my history along with her pain. Those pictures were more than photographs. They were proof. Memory. Connection. When they were ruined, something in me was taken too.

At the end of the day, she made those choices. And knowing what I know now, some of that anger feels misplaced. It looks less like dignity and more like a tit-for-tat response rooted in hurt rather than healing. Hurt people often stay trapped in fractured situations, convincing themselves that endurance equals strength. Some put on facades so they can look picture-perfect while unraveling on the inside. I understand now that she was not free, and she never chose herself.

In the end, I had to watch her die a grueling death. She fought. Oh, my mother was a fighter. But the trauma she carried within herself was a war no one could imagine. To know you are dying because of your own choices, while the person you blame is already gone, is a weight few can survive. I watched her battle not just illness, but regret, anger, and unresolved truth until the very end.

Children need comfort when they are hurting. All of it. Looking back now, I see that my trauma wasn’t rooted in one moment, but in many avenues that formed a maze of pain. Silence. Fear. Loss. Secrets. Survival layered on top of one another. Everyone has bones in their closet, and neither of my parents were free and clear of that. But in the middle of it all, a child was left carrying what no one stopped to protect.

Years later, grief returned in a way I never expected. I learned that the man I had loved and mourned as my father was not my biological father. In that moment, I had to grieve him all over again. A second death without a funeral. A truth that shattered something I thought was already settled.

Grief does not end. It changes shape. It resurfaces. It overlaps itself. And healing, I’ve learned, doesn’t always come from answers. Sometimes it begins by finally telling the story in order, exactly as it happened, and allowing the pain to be seen instead of buried.