Mateo was 24 and his mother had been dead for three months when he found MomentoVital. What brought him there wasn’t the acute pain — he’d held that together through muscle tension and weeks of nonstop work. What brought him was that the pain wasn’t leaving even when he had time to feel it.
Where he started
His mother died suddenly. No preparation, no goodbye, no chance to say what was left unsaid. Mateo had an unfinished conversation with her about something small and trivial that now felt enormous. Graduate school continued. Professors asked questions. He submitted work on time. On the outside: functioning. On the inside, as he put it: “I’m running on emergency mode and there’s no emergency to handle.”
Day 1, he asked for one specific thing: to understand what was happening to him. Not to be told it was normal. To understand it.
The first days
Grief psychoeducation came first. Mateo processed well through knowledge — it was his natural mode. Understanding that grief doesn’t follow linear stages, that the mind can keep “searching” for a person even while rationally knowing they’re gone, that the emotional numbness of the first weeks is adaptive rather than coldness — that helped him stop pathologizing his own process.
The first days of emotional regulation were hard. Mateo had trained his system not to feel while there was something to do. The techniques — noticing the emotion, naming it, giving it space without acting from it — demanded exactly what he most avoided: stopping.
On day 6, he cried for the first time since the funeral.
The turning point
Day 19. He was searching his phone for a photo for an academic project and found one of his mother he didn’t remember having. A silly photo — her making a face at a birthday party. Not a solemn image of a mother. A photo of a funny person.
He looked at it for a long time. Things began surfacing that had been obscured by the grief: her humor, their private jokes, the specific things she did that nobody else did the same way. Until then, grief had reduced his mother to her death. That day, something opened toward her life.
Where he is now
By day 28, Mateo is still studying. Still has days when grad school feels completely pointless. But he’s been able to talk with a couple of friends about what happened — not just the event, but how it feels. He’s cooking again. Reading fiction for the first time in months. He hasn’t “gotten over” anything. He’s doing what he called it: “learning to carry it differently.”
Techniques that worked
- Grief psychoeducation: understanding the process as a foundation for not misreading it
- Emotional regulation: creating space for emotion without being overwhelmed by it
- Meaning reconstruction: recovering the person’s full life beyond their death