Compounding Loss

Six years ago this month, my Mama passed away. It was a stunning loss for me, made even worse by the proximity to my birthday and Christmas, a series of traumatic events surrounding her death, and the global pandemic which hit within weeks of our return to Hong Kong following her funeral. By the time our borders fully reopened and we could finally go back to America to be in the same room with people who had known and loved her, years had passed. My Dad had already remarried and most everyone had some form of “loss fatigue” after hearing about thousands of deaths every day from Covid-19. Everyone had moved on it seemed. Except me, the motherless grown woman who just wanted to talk about her.

This was so difficult and unexpected that it drove me first to therapy, then to a year of working on a project about loss and grief. I spent almost all of 2023 reading every book and resource on grief while writing about losing my first home, my Mama. The trip Michael and I took across Europe to visit as many Christmas Markets as we could fit into a couple weeks was part of a plan both to redeem the Christmas season which had become quite triggering to me, and to mark the 5th anniversary of my mother’s passing in my dreamiest bucket list of a city, Bruges, Belgium. It was meant to be a form of closure as we released rose petals into the canal in front of our hotel as swans floated past. And it was so perfect and so beautiful, I could not have asked for a better way to personally honor what she’d meant to me, standing with my husband who had been so loved by her that she never once called him her son-in-law, only her son.

How was I to know that the symbolic closure of one great loss meant the opening of a new cycle of loss and grief?

Even as we stood there together, tearfully marking the 5th anniversary of my Mama’s death, Michael’s body was already producing blast cells, rapidly filling his bloodstream with cancer. Not quite a year later, just three days before the 6th anniversary of losing my mother, Michael would also be gone. This time, thanks to all that hard work I’d done in therapy plus the passage of a few years, I didn’t initially see the fact that I’d now experienced two enormous losses in this season as horrifically triggering — it felt instead like it might be a small mercy.

Instead of being sad in December plus some other month, it could all be concentrated in what has always been my favorite time of year. It’s when most of the world is festive and beautifully decorated, while people tend to (mostly) be in joyful moods, happy to greet total strangers with cheer. A high point combined with a low point to keep moving forward on an even keel. It was certainly a paradigm shift from how I’d felt prior to last year in Bruges, when for the first time in my life Christmas had became something to tolerate instead of celebrate. I can work with this, I thought, I can find meaning here and not fall apart.

But the recurring theme of grief and loss over the holidays was not quite done with us.

Michael’s mother Carol has been in a slow decline over the past few years. In the same family group chat where I’d been updating all the siblings on a daily (or sometimes twice-daily) basis on every new and scary thing which happened during the last weeks of his life, we learned from his oldest sister that Carol’s decline had accelerated. On the evening of Christmas in California, just a little over two weeks after Michael, my sweet and wonderful mother-in-law also passed into eternity.

The boys and I were in what could only be described as shock, sitting around the table staring at each other with our mouths open. One of my sons commented, “So there’s no Dad, and now we don’t have our grandmas either.” Looking at their faces, all I could think of was a prism, shining different losses on all the members of the extended Chase family in different ways. In this final month of 2025, my boys lost a father and a grandma, their aunts and uncles lost a brother and a mother, my father-in-law lost a son and his wife. It was so overwhelming and horrible I could think of no words to say or to write, and I didn’t even know what to think. My brain was filled with static.

Over the last year while Michael was in cancer treatment and severely immunocompromised, we often had long discussions about what it would feel like if our parents were to pass away while we were unable to be there. We imagined in great detail a scenario where Michael, who had been tasked years ago with writing some funny vignettes about his parents to read at their funerals, wasn’t able to be there in person. We allowed ourselves to feel all the feelings in advance, knowing it would be impossibly dangerous (or just impossible) for Michael to make the journey.

What we never imagined in these many deep and serious conversations, was a scenario in which Michael might have preceded any of them in death. I am filled with sorrow for the sadness enveloping my family at the present moment. Today on New Year’s Eve there were still Christmas carols playing in the grocery store, and from where I type this I see lighted trees in the windows of my neighbors in the adjoining building. That feeling I had, the one about additional losses this time of year perhaps being a small mercy? I don’t know if it still holds up.

Here’s what I want to tell you about Michael’s mother, my mother-in-law of 29 amazing years:

For me, she was the perfect complement to my own mom. Together they provided the best combination of mothering I could have ever had, which fills me with so much gratitude. They got along fabulously despite being very different. My mom was a no-nonsense tomboy who tolerated my girlish interests, but Carol indulged every one. I had the best of both worlds.

A core memory with my mother-in-law came just a year after I’d married her son. A large exhibit called “Jewels of the Romanovs: Treasures of the Russian Imperial Court” came to the San Diego Museum of Art. It included a stunning collection of royal jewels along with intricate gowns worn by the imperial family, large family portraits, and other amazing artifacts of a bygone era touring America for the first time. Michael had no interest in going, but Carol was quick to jump at the opportunity to see these pretty, sparkly things just a few hours’ drive away.

Together we ooh’ed and ahh’ed our way through the galleries, at one point standing in front of an intricately embroidered silk gown worn by the murdered Empress Alexandra. We both found ourselves wiping away tears because the work was astonishing, exquisite, a marvel of artistry. We laughed at our tears, then sniffled some more over the next tiny gown in the exhibit, worn by the Princess Anastasia. Crying over something delicate and beautiful? Yes, Carol was definitely a kindred spirit!

Except for our two years in the San Francisco Bay Area when Ben was born, we always lived near Michael’s parents during our time in America. Carol was the most sympathetic of ears to me on any topic I shared with her, and the first to volunteer to babysit the boys when they were tiny. She gave both my sons their first baths. I remember how she was graciously hesitant to do so, because she didn’t want to take away any “firsts” from me. But I insisted as I adored watching her love her grandsons with such care and tenderness, and I will forever treasure her being an amazing grandma to our young sons. Like me, they also got the best of both worlds, this time in the grandmothering department.

Shortly after Michael’s diagnosis with Acute Leukemia, I paused that previously mentioned yearlong project centered on grief and loss.

I realized the story I thought I was telling was perhaps going another direction — an extreme understatement in retrospect. While setting it aside for a bit, I started this Plucky Day newsletter to be able to write about the current situation while it was still unfolding, asking people to bravely join in without any of us knowing what the outcome would be. I never thought all my extensive research on grieving would be needed in this space, but here we are (even if I’m not feeling very plucky about any of it in this moment).

It’s stunning to look in the drafts folder to see the newsy update I was almost ready to publish just two days before Michael died. It’s heartbreaking to see the post he was working on before he went into the ICU, filled with data and charts and an extreme amount of radical hope. As this month draws to a close, I want to thank you for holding onto that hope with and for us, for continuing to support the boys and I, and in turn the rest of the Chase family as they sit with the weight of double losses at the end of a brutal year.

I’m signing off before the clock strikes midnight to spend these last few hours of 2025 with my sons and the precious memories of their dad, and to think of my sweet and wonderful mother-in-law, an incredible woman who I loved dearly.

I hope that wherever you are in the world, you don’t let this year end without telling someone in your life that you love them. It’s always worth it.

More soon.