I’m not going to lie, I don’t know if it’s the manageable but all-pervasive depression, or the general state of the world (at war, on fire, capitulating to a Cheeto-dusted proto bane on democracy), or the general sense of malaise, but 2025 has had the worst free trial period I have ever seen. The vibes are rancid.
And then, last week late on Friday afternoon, I got a lovely and kind message from my godsister that my godmother had died.
There is a lot to say about how bloody good Succession was as a piece of art, but there were so many minutes in the final season that hit me in the ribs. The portrayal of damaged children in general and daughters in particular touched a chord in me that I am still thinking about two years past the finale. But as I type this I’m thinking about the quiet, devastating, awkward, fraught plot point of Roman who declares so confidently that he has “pre grieved” his father’s demise only to fall to pieces at a funeral that he is in no way prepared to handle because while you can anticipate grief, you are never fully prepared for the ugliness and rawness of it when it envelopes you.
My godmother was a force of nature. She was an Air Force brat who grew up moving too much for her to feel settled, and managing a less than stable family situation. Her reaction to that was to plant roots, and grow them deep and wide.
My mother and godmother were sorority sisters and when my parents married and converted or recommitted to the LDS faith, those choices came with consequences. For six years I was an only child and as my father was in the military, my parents were required to have an active will to manage the care of their estate and dependents. My parents didn’t want me to be raised outside of their faith if anything happened to them, and so for my whole minority, in the event of their death my care was willed to another family’s care.
I didn’t grow up really knowing my godparents, which is not even a real concept in Mormonism, but the term was the easiest shorthand to explain the bizarre entanglements of legality and religiosity. But even though I have only vague memories of crossing paths with my godmother a couple of times growing up, a card would arrive in whatever state or country we happened to be living in every year for my birthday.
When I was 18, my parents moved from Guam to Belgium - literally across the world - and left me in the care of my grandparents to work for the summer before university started, and to make my way to Utah on my own. My godmother picked me up from the airport, drove me to my university dorm, and informed me that I was invited to Sunday dinner later that month. No questions, no debate.
And so, at least once a moth for nearly a decade, I trekked to their house a few cities over, for rowdy, loud, raucous, and deeply loving meals where politics were shouted about, gossip shared, and an expanding cast of characters grew. My godmother, you see, had a magnificent talent for family. She had one, but she also grew more with an excess of love, joy, and unfettered empathy. If she chose you, you were hers. And when I was just a random baby on a far off island, because she had loved my mother, she decided to also love me.
From her kitchen table, I navigated four years of university and the first shaky steps of adulthood. Our shared military brat experiences meant that she spoke a language and understood elements of how I had grown up that often took paragraphs of text to explain to others. We also had complicated extended families, with similar generational dramas and traumas that gave her experience and insight that I needed when it came time to confront old wounds. Where I was still young and fresh and angry, she had the benefit of time and healing and was generous in sharing both.
I watched all three godsiblings marry their high school sweethearts, and eventually Jeff was the only boyfriend I “brought home” to “meet the family.” Jeff took to my odd second family like a duck to water and and baffled our fellow Mormons by explaining that he couldn’t make certain church event because it was “my godfather-in-law’s birthday” or “my wife’s godsister’s baby shower.” From the moment I confessed to my godmother than I was in love with him (somewhat against my own will, as I didn’t expect to find my person at 22), he was also one of her ever-growing family. I don’t think she ever failed to give him a birthday care or celebratory dinner either.
And if I sound special…I’m not, not really. She did this for every single person she adopted, whether there was a Power of Attorney document in play or no, and delighted in the doing of it. She was a pillar of her neighbourhood community, her church, her children’s and grandchildren’s schools. She was a fierce friend, a loyal and unflinching ally in the fight of life, a woman whose table could grow and expand to fit however many people she needed to feed that day and the only question she would ask was how many pans of breadsticks she’d need to make to feed everybody.
A few years ago, her attention started faltering. Then her memory. No one really knows what the exact cascade of conditions and symptoms are, but her mind and body gave out in a way that acted like fast acting and devastating dementia. In the last couple of years, her speech, mobility, and motor skills all left her and when we visited her last summer, she was a literal shadow of her former self. My godfather was providing round the clock care to a woman who could no longer speak, walk, feed herself, or communicate and had shrunk to under 100 lbs. She could still smile and I like to believe she recognised me as she lit up for visitors.
I knew what her condition was. I’d been prepared…I’d thought. I thought I’d pre-grieved her loss, but I was badly, badly wrong. Seeing the woman who for half of my life has been the most vibrant, energetic embodiment of active love I’d ever seen in the world in a state of such utter dependency and stillness completely gutted me. Some things can’t be corralled and contained, no matter how rational and forewarned. It was a joy to see her and I’m deeply grateful that we were able to…but I sobbed all the way home after our visit. It felt like I had been to a funeral, and in the moment, I thought that I was grieving a woman who was clearly no longer with us, though her body remained.
But then I heard she actually passed, and another wave of grief hit. Unexpected. Tidal. Overwhelming.
Pre grieving is a useful lie, I’ve decided. It forces you to deal with and confront pain and loss, to begin learning to manage your feelings. It’s a tool for composing your face and raw emotions into something presentable for public scrutiny. It’s a technique to keep yourself upright. But grief, when it finally hits in all its authentic, sharp-edged, twisting potency, is a gut punch that no amount of anticipation or forewarning can prepare you to feel. At some point, what you have logically prepared yourself to feel confronts actual human emotion and messy reality…and the latter always wins.
I did not realise how much I thought I had “pre grieved” until actual grief hit. And I did not realise until sitting with actual grief for a week how many other issues have been categorised in my own head as being “pre grieved.” I feel suddenly aware that I am walking around with an ocean of future pain inside me, held back by tiny dykes and levies that have never really had a huge storm to stand up to. My world feels a little less safe with her loss and this awareness.
It’s odd to feel grateful for that, but I am in a strange way. She was one of the people who taught me how to love, how to make a family and not just be born into one. She was open with me and others that loving people fiercely often meant dealing with disappointment, conflict, unexpected harms and emotional wounds. But she also was a person who demonstrated in every conceivable way that the work of love and community is one of continuous outreach, repair, generosity, and choice in the face of of that. That choosing to be vulnerable to the messiness and pain of human beings is a fair exchange for the sweetness and joy and delight of one another.
To love her and have been loved by her was a gift.
