There’s a little bar across the street from my mom’s house.

We went there for dinner the week of the funeral, while everyone was still around. We were waiting for some family members to join us when a woman turned around at the bar and said, “Margaret!”

My stomach dropped in that moment, and I had to resist the urge to look at the door.

Margaret was gone.

I hadn’t heard anyone call out her name in public before, and I haven’t heard it since, and it felt like a cruel joke in the moment, because the grief was overwhelming. It felt empty and deep and raw and calloused all at once.

I didn’t want to feel it anymore.

And we were at a bar.

I’ve had a difficult relationship with alcohol for a long time. Drugs weren’t something I messed with due to my faith, but alcohol was legal and regulated, even though I started before I was officially old enough. I got drunk for the first time when I was 18, on a trip to Florida with my college roommate. I drank so much that my body became heavy while my brain grew light, and I crawled to bed that night giggling.

When I lived in New York City, depressed by my inability to find a job and the oppression of my living situation, I’d buy little jars of Manischewitz and drink in bed, hiding the bottle just in case anyone came into my room. Just for a moment, that moment before it was too much, there was this buzz that took everything away. My anxiety, my fear, my headaches would all just go away when I drank. And while I was young enough, the hangovers weren’t even that bad.

I got older and started drinking more socially. The hangovers got worse, so I tried to regulate. Just one drink, I’d tell myself.

Well, just two.

Whoops.

I couldn’t regulate my drinking, but those mistakes are easy enough to hide. It’s celebrated, encouraged. I could sleep on a friend’s couch if I drank too much.

Then Margaret died.

I drank a lot that week after her death. I’d numb everything and sleep it off. It took about five days of dealing with the grief-infused hangovers for me to realize that there was no avoiding it.

The tricky thing about grief is that there’s no way to get around it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no sleeping until it passes. It’s ugly and it feels bad and the only way to heal is through.

Alcohol stops and stunts the healing, but I couldn’t acknowledge it for awhile.

There was no big moment for me, nothing profound. It simply took me nearly a week to understand that in order to grieve, I needed to feel bad.

There were good moments at the bar, too. It was at the bar that my brother asked for our memories of Margaret, since he had so few of his own. It was at the bar that my sister said that we were going to forget her, and I knew I needed to get my tattoo as soon as possible, so I would have a permanent reminder.

And I realized this was all part of the process too, the good moments of new memories with my family. Yet ultimately, to stop feeling so horrible, I had to stop drinking.

To survive, I had to face healing and let go of the small moments of relief.

Things didn’t get better right away.

In fact, they got much worse.