With mom on hospice services and the clock running out, I hold vigil at her bedside and watched her breathe. In and out. There is comfort in that. The breath you felt on your arm, your cheek, the top of your head, that security blanket of coziness is the only thing I can now count. It is strangely comforting and suffocating at the same time.

A nagging voice in my head began to talk over her in- and- out breath three days before the end. “What are you going to learn from this? Your mother is dying”. The voice kind of pissed me off, breaking the hypnotic denial I was basking in.

Startled, I searched for an answer. Nothing came. Breathing, both of us breathing now in tandem. Her eyes closed, my eyes on her. I was urgently nudged to answer. A quick review of what led to this moment, a reel of her stacked losses flashed before me. Her husband gone, then her cancer diagnosis, and lately more friends dying. And now this. Another voice answered quick and concise with conviction. ‘Love like crazy’. That was it. My takeaway was to squeeze the juice out of life’s intimate moments. Maybe love is the secret sauce that you bring with you, adding it to everything you do and touch. Love like crazy, better answer than any other I decided. But that was then.

Sucker punched after her last breath, I fell into a dark abyss. The world lost color. Our unsaid words flashed like neon signs, emblazoned in my brain.

There is no getting back to normal. A parent’s death closes the chapter on your life. It is the end of that book where you were the child and your parent was there, always. The abrupt ending is replaced with a new chapter, but it is foreign and the pages are completely empty and void of human memory. As if taken to a forest and left alone, I had to find a new path and carve a new role, and somehow find a new meaning to life because her death changed me. I could no longer stuff the Me that was before she died into the Me that was left and becoming.

Grief is a trickster. You can be in a room of people who love you, who you have given your heart to, and still feel alone. It isn’t them. It is you. You don’t recognize yourself. You are alone without the You that you had grown accustomed to knowing. Get a grip you think, you are an adult for Gods’ sake.

The child, our inner child forever lives and is always hungry for more love, attention, adoration. Your life became a ball wrapped tight with ancestral roles and patterns. You knew who to turn to and count on. So, when the parent goes, we become the abandoned child. The ball unravels.

One day a voice said: ‘Maybe you are next”. I could not face my mother’s mortality without facing my own. The death knell was once a bell for others. Hiding behind the clinical title and wearing the role of compassionate comforter, I was RN health practitioner where death was always happening to someone else. And then that someone else was me and I barely knew her.

The phone is there, but she is not on the other end. You want to call when you think of something funny. Or you remember a memory and want to share: ‘You know that time when…’. I even wanted to be angry at things she did or didn’t do, and make up for time lost on anger and estrangements, a ridiculous one legged race now.

A few months in I think I am getting stronger, and then a wave of feeling, fear, anger, or some mutant emotion floods my body. My mind stalls, I stare into the void.

A year goes by and I say, ‘I can’t believe it’s been a year since she died’. I bargain. My takeaways begin to look like Hallmark card clichés. ‘Life is short’. ‘Live to the fullest’. ‘Don’t put vacations on the back burner’. ‘Do it now’.

And then one day I looked back and said, I was there. I showed up. I did my best. And I begin to sleep deeper, love harder, and hold onto moments longer.