06/02/2026
My post about my mother's passing was brief.
The storm of thoughts and feelings and memories is something that could fill books with conflicting chapters and overlapping messages and it's almost impossible to sort through.
I thought that my mother's death would hurt so badly that it would kill me. I have lived through grief before, and the loss of someone whose heart beat sustained mine, whose lungs breathed into me as I grew inside her belly, whose body carried me after I was born and who has overlapped my entire existence in such a crucial way.. Someone that I loved deeply. Admired thoroughly, worked out any conflict with and had a truly uncomplicated beautiful friendship and love with. That loss should carry with it the most crushing and devastating grief.
Instead I feel something else.
My mother firmly held the belief that she would never die. I don't mean that she was in denial about the realities of our bodies. She understood her heart would cease to beat and that her body would transition through flame to ashes as she wished.
I have never, in the slightest, believed anything like what she said she believed about life and about death. I gently teased her about it and she would tell me that she knew I thought she was crazy.
I think some part of me holds deeply that what we believe is true. What is our experience of life if it's not a story we tell ourselves? And how, in this fourty sixth year of my life, with her telling me what she has believed, can my heart simply set aside the truth she held for herself and allow itself to collapse into grieving?
I believe grief is healthy. I believe tears release stress. I believe the strength of our grief reflects the depth of the love that we felt for the person that we have lost.
I do not think I am in shock. I understand that things come in waves.
But right now I am finding myself strangely blessed with something that I believe my mama wanted to give me. I am seeing everything beautiful that she saw in people. I feel calm and even happy and at peace and as though I have some small understanding of what she meant when she said she was never going to die.
I think she meant that all of the beauty and wonder and goodness she saw in the world, her playfulness and her fierceness and all the stories she created with all of us were permanent and indelible and that her soul would float along on these as long as everyone that knew her breathes.
And then as we all pass and all the remenants of her memory and time in this world pass with us, the energy that she held in her small fierce body? It will exhale itself back into a world where we are all living out the stories we tell ourselves.
I am not trying to find comfort in an idea. I am not trying to tell myself a story. I am trying to grieve. But it is a beautiful day and all the people around me are lovely and human and precious and it's all just so beautiful that it is distracting.
And it's this strange feeling because she spent the last years of her life commenting so constantly about how beautiful everyone and everything was.
I expect grief to hit me like a freight train at some point. Like I said, I consider it necessary and helpful.
But for now I will breathe this feeling in as a parting gift from a sweet and lovely soul.
