A couple of months ago I had an ingrown toenail removed from my right foot. This toenail had been hurting for a long time. I delayed the surgery because I knew I would not be able to wear gym shoes for a while. What can I say, I work out 6 days a week! Towards the end while wrapping my big toe, the doctor proceeded to say the following: “Your toe is going to hurt tonight, but it will be different, it’s going to be the healing kind of pain.
“Your toe is going to hurt tonight, but it will be different—it’s going to be the healing kind of pain.”
At that moment, I knew I had finally found the title for the website I’d been carrying around for at least six years—The Pain of Healing. Within 48 hours, I secured my domain name, and this blog became official. I now had a place to share my thoughts and feelings about my experiences with grief, loss, and loneliness.
Wait! What? Not having a title is the excuse I’ve been hiding behind for the last several years.
Now my title has found me and I have no choice. One of my objectives is to write about these very human experiences that none of us like to talk about—grief, loss, and loneliness.
My journey with grief and loss started when I was born, but we’re going to fast forward from 1973 to 1990, age 16, when my mother died. I was raised by my maternal grandmother. The school day at Northwestern High School ended, so I walked home like most days. I remember my grandmother saying, “Charlene is sick, she got that AIDS.” In 1990, AIDS was quite different than it is in 2025.
When I first got the news, I was overwhelmed. I remember leaving the house and walking to a friend’s house. Inside, I was confused and uncertain about how to feel. The woman my grandmother never encouraged me to love was now dying, and as her only child, I had to take that L all alone.
Everyone went to visit her at the hospital while she was awake and conscious—except me. One of my aunts told me she wasn’t doing well and that I needed to go see her. I remember going into her room, crying out, “Mamma, I love you!”
The first time I called her “Mamma” was on her deathbed. By this time, she was unconscious, and within 1-2 days, she was gone. I have always believed she held on for me. I would learn later that your hearing is one of the last senses to go.
Fast forward 30 years from 1990 to 2020. At the age of 46, I woke up from a dream screaming and crying. I dreamt about my mother’s funeral. Everyone in the dream was the age they were when she died, but I was 46.
At 16, I only had bits and pieces of my mother. But at 46, I understood her life, her trauma, and her death. I understood that she was one of the black sheep of the family and she and her other two siblings were sexually abused and neglected. I understood that I was raised by the people who allowed these traumatic events to unfold and they did nothing about it. I didn’t grow up with this awareness, and I loved them dearly.
The grief of my mother’s life and death hit me like a ton of bricks, and my life has never been the same. It is from this place of pain, at the age of 46, that my mother’s death became real. In 1990, Charlene died. In 2020, in that dream, my mother died. And who would I even begin to unpack this with? It had been 30 years—everyone else had moved on.
The pandemic began. I moved far away from my support system with a husband I was in the process of separating from. I lost contact with the therapist I’d had for the previous two years, and I lost access to healthcare altogether. My daughter, who was 19 at the time, decided to leave the nest and stay with her father.
I forgot to mention—I’m a therapist. So yes, I had to press my way through all of this, with no therapy of my own, while helping others survive the immense feelings of grief and loneliness brought on by the pandemic.
NOW we come full circle back to the ingrown toenail surgery. Unpacking through writing has been painful, but it’s the other kind of pain. The healing kind of pain.
I decided to take this journey public. Welcome to my journey of the pain that heals.