Part Three: Tending What Remains

My mother was an exceptional woman. She was kind and intelligent. Gracious and patient. Even in my grief, I knew this was something worth holding on to.

I will always miss her physical presence in my life. I will always want to share my exciting moments and experiences with her.

So I made a quiet decision not to move on. Instead, I chose to stay connected to her.

I spoke her name. I let myself remember. I allowed the ache to exist without demanding that it hurry.

I would not pretend she had never existed. I would learn how to live in a way that still made room for her.

Only later did I learn that what I was doing had a name. I was tending my grief.

I started using small, ordinary moments in my life to remember my mom. Instead of avoiding the pain, I let myself feel the loss and the love together as a means of connection.

I chose music I knew she loved and let myself cry when it came.

I wrote poetry about grief and loss.

I made art and thought of her while I worked.

I talked about her with my kids. I told funny stories. I told sad ones. I said her name.

I wanted her memory to remain alive in our home, not sealed away in silence.

I also tried to carry what she had been into the relationships that were still here. I worked on learning how to communicate with my dad and my brother in ways my mom would have appreciated. I tried to bring her gentleness into spaces that no longer had her in the middle.

I did not try to get over her.

I learned how to carry her.

My grief has changed shape over the last five years. I have allowed myself to feel it and let it move through me. I am no longer drowning.

But that does not change the truth that when something exciting happens, my mom is the first person I want to tell.

Both of those things can be true.

I can be okay, and I can miss her deeply at the same time.

Loving the children I am raising. Loving the life I am building. Loving the woman I am becoming does not cancel the grief for the life I thought my mother would be here to see.

Healing did not mean letting my mother go. It meant learning how to keep loving her in a way that did not cost me my own life.

Grief did not disappear. Instead, by tending it like a plant I brought home from her funeral, it grew into something new. A living memorial of her life.

It became something quieter. Something steadier. Something that still aches, but no longer controls the shape of my days.

Now I carry her with me.

Not as a wound that never closes.

But as love that has never ended.