July 6, 2025

It was real. She was real. She was genuine and she loved so much. She was kind, she was gentle, she was lovely. She was happy, she was strong, she was proud. She smiled brightly and shined iridescently.

She was my Mommy, and she was a mother and a friend to so many. I just miss my mom. Each day she feels just a little farther away. Each day it hurts just a little more. I hate this so much.

I experienced immense growth and healing over the past six years, and the past six months I had begun counseling to work through the traumas I had been stuck in. Life felt nearly perfect. It was so beautiful and so sweet. These past few years God taught me that incredible goodness transpires after formidable sorrow.

I wish this wasn’t happening, but I know that life will be good again. This sadness will always be with me, but a time will come when it doesn’t bring me to my knees every day. It will probably always bring me to my knees at random moments, but it won’t always be this horrible.

Mourning sacredly positions us between this reality and the metaphysical. Grief connects us closely to the next realm and forces us to think of a lifetime of memories, teleporting our minds into the past.

Our past was real. It was sacred, it was sweet.

I don’t know what the future holds, and if I’m quite honest, right now I am anxious about it: Am I doomed to the same fate? Is my family? Loss instantly makes one so afraid of more loss. I have reason to be anxious, but I likewise have reason to hope.

Sorrow and joy have eclipsed my life for so long. When Mom died, it felt like all the brightness vaporized from my whole world. She was so bright and so optimistic and so full of light and life. Losing her has left such an enormous void in my life and in the lives of so many others. She was light in so many ways🤍. Right now, life feels so dark, but light will return to our eyes.

I am experiencing a depth of sorrow I never imagined possible and never wanted, but I know I will grow and heal to experience a happiness and a joy I could never before comprehend.

Loss has changed and shaped my life in unimaginable ways. In ways I never wanted, but this isn’t the end.

This isn’t my family’s end. This isn’t our end.

My Mom was a glorious light, and she was one of the best parts of my life. She gave me life, not just in my birth, but in all the joy she gave me. In all of our wonderful memories, in all of our laughter, in all of our joy. She made my life fun. She made everything fun.

I don’t know how to do this without her. I don’t know how to be bright and fun and loving, not like she was, but I want to honor her. I barely know how to laugh without her. It’s so dark without her right now, but the light is coming. I want to make her proud. I want to dance in the light she had, in a way she always wished she had.

I loved my Momma. I always will.

Thank you, Momma, for being the brightest light in my life.

I love you forever,

I love you for always.

On earth or in heaven,

Your baby I’ll be.

July 6, 2026

A chasm, a deep and rich valley, seems to separate me from my mother now. I feel such a vast distance from her. It seems like ages since she left, but these surreal feelings remain.

Strangely, it’s as if she was from an entirely different life. It feels unbelievable that I really had a Momma, and that now she’s obliterated.

It’s difficult to explain, but it often feels like she couldn’t have been real. My mind has a hard time reconciling that she is and then was — there’s a cruel dissonance.

How could she be all of these wonderful things and yet no longer be?

How can she affect every fiber of my being and yet not be in this world any longer?

Sudden, unexpected deaths transpose survivors between the worlds of “is” and “was,” leaving us in a liminal space between realities. It’s not an obsession with death or loss, it’s a new perspective forced upon us the moment they breathed their last breath

She gave me no reason to mourn while she was alive, she gave me no indication of her life being close to death. How long did she plan to leave me?

I wonder what she would say to me now. I wonder if her eyes would well with heavy tears.

I wonder if she would do it again, knowing what she knows now. Or maybe I don’t want to know.

She was real. It was all real. This life and this death of unfathomable depths confronts every layer of perspective. It stitches to each layer, a cord of red — the color of blood, the color or life poured out — and sews depth and love and loss into the fabric of my tattered and strewn life.