My Weekend at Sad Camp

After my mother’s death, I signed up for a grief retreat in the forests of California. It upended everything I knew about mourning—and healing.

- By Maïté Snauwaert

FOR MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE, my mother and I were estranged. She was difficult, prone to anger and often declined to answer the phone for weeks or months at a time. Twenty years ago, when I offered to introduce her to my husband, she replied with a one-word email: “NO.” The last time I saw her was in May of 2022. My sister and I—she in Paris, me travelling in Berlin—had spent a week trying to reach our mother. Finally, we hopped on a train to the small town in France where she lived to make sure she was okay. The visit was tense and suffocating, as if the confinement of the pandemic had made her home smaller, or me into a giant.

When my mother died the following year, I felt both angry and numb. There would be no holding hands, no final peace. Thankfully, my siblings and I had each other. The four of us gathered to deal with the funeral and the house, since our mother had left no instructions. When I returned home to Edmonton, I threw myself into work, my usual coping mechanism. I’m a professor of literature at the University of Alberta, and I made myself busier than ever, even as I complained that I wasn’t able to pause and grieve. In truth, I didn’t know how to fit the enormity of the loss into the normal frame of reality. Ironically, my research involves examining grief: I was about to publish a new book about mourning memoirs. Still, I felt poorly equipped to deal with loss first-hand. My mother and I had spent years with almost no contact—but she was still a number I could reach. Now her absence was complete. In this new loneliness, I just wanted someone to make me soup.