“She’s in what they call the ‘numbing phase.’ It’s when everything hurts too much to fully comprehend it, so she doesn’t…” Vi gives me a long, pointed look. “It sounds familiar.” I’m self-aware enough to have already wondered whether that’s the phase of grief that I’m in, and maybe I’m in an abstract part of it, but my mother’s grief and my grief are incomparable because our relationships with the deceased are also incomparable.
