I CHRONICLE THIS EVENT

A Christian Blog on Loss and Grieving
Introduction: Processing Loss, Week 1
emily ulman/19Jun25

To my new Christian blog on loss and grieving, for now an 8-week series, this is its introduction focusing on processing loss.

I lost my mom this year. The cause of death was listed on her certificate as End Stage Dementia due to Adult Failure to Thrive, an immense understatement.

How many strokes could a deteriorating brain withstand? I’d wondered this, until her last. Then it became clear, she could take no more. Mom became bedridden and peaceful, unalert for two days before signs began that her dying progression was happening. I found the little yellow book that hospice provided about what to expect in her last hours to be remarkably exact.

Discoloration began that showed her heart was slowing, no longer circulating blood flow or warmth to her limbs. Her blood pressure lowered. Her breaths slowed. Then her final exhalation. And quiet stillness.

This all happened in a span of 14 hours’ time. Fourteen hours of her bedside being surrounded by family, memories, laughter and tears, all with her favorite old hymns playing softly so Mom could hear them, and cool night air coming in the open window above her.

That was winter. It’s now summer and I’m still processing loss, this profound loss.

We knew before Mom’s end that it was nearing. Five years leading to it had been spent losing her slowly, each week a new level of decline being reached. I’d thought all those parts of her I was already missing had prepared me to be without her. I now know better. Nothing can truly prepare a child for their mother to be altogether gone from them, even when that mother is elderly, and that child is herself past middle age.

In the moments, days, weeks following my mother’s peaceful passing, the finality of her death was what struck me hardest. We think we understand that death is final, but to personally feel that finality is an experience for which our thinking minds are ill-equipped. In the thick of grief this finality of death brings more than sadness, it is startling, even incapacitating. I recognize more than ever the vital necessity of deep rooted, within-my-spirit faith in processing loss.

There’ve been affecting moments along the way of walking within my mom’s end of life journey.

In a, for now, 8-part blog series, I share these. Each a step toward processing loss and healing. “But then face to face… I will know fully even as I have been fully known” (1Cor13:12 NASB).
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