The Investigation Stage of Grief

Over the next week while we cleaned out her apartment, we found evidence of opioid and benzodiazepine abuse. During the week after Mom died, Morgan and I planned the entire funeral, wrote an obituary, wrote and gave a eulogy, identified our mom’s body at a crematorium, cleaned out her entire apartment, and suddenly took on roles as detectives as we uncovered the secrets of my mom’s addiction to pills that we didn’t know about while she was alive. The more we uncovered, the more questions we had. In the weeks and months to come, I became obsessed with finding out answers and became stuck in the “investigative” stage of grief.