In the beginning, it felt like total fog.

You never really know what grief will feel like until it hits you, and even then it's

different for every one of us.

Sundery Malcolm's mom passed away in 2007, and in the months that followed, her life

fell apart.

You know, right after she died, I laid on the couch and watched the food network and drank

a lot of wine and didn't do a whole lot of much.

I was really kind of frozen in my grief at that point.

I remember I would wake up and I don't even know how to explain this, but it's like for

a split second you don't remember it's happened.

And there is this like split second of like, oh, it's another day, and then it's like

a truck hits you.

For seven years, Sundery had been taking care of her mom who had breast cancer.

And even though she knew her mother was dying, nothing braced her for what came after.

I wasn't prepared for the grief.

I wasn't prepared about how many different places grief would touch, like something like

a phone, you know, something like a song or a smell, a holiday, seeing other family,

like I did not know how much it was going to shift.

I don't know that there is a way to prepare for that.

After the initial fog and numbness, she felt a lot of anger and then sadness.

Eventually things got so unbearable, Sundery decided to escape.

For me, it became a holy shit I got to get out of here.

...