It’s been one month without her. I’ve never gone this long without speaking to her. I still find myself waiting for her to get back. I forget she’s not here sometimes. I’ll just be doing something and think, “oh, I should tell Mum about this,” and then the terrible realization dawns on me yet again. Sometimes, late at night, I can’t stop crying because I’m thinking about her, and in the past, when I was this sad, I would have woken her up and she’d comfort me. I guess it’s not really the same thing, because those scenarios were a form of self-harm/suicude prevention, and now I just feel like I need one of her hugs. There are some things where a similar replacement cannot be capable of achieving anything close to the original thing, and her late night hugs were one of those.
I am absolutely shocked at how well I’ve been doing. I’m functional. I’m not crying all the time. It feels wrong. It feels against my nature. I feel a bit numb. I’ve known for forever that Mum’s death was my worst nightmare, and the thought of it had kept me up at night since I was a kid. I sort of assumed that when she died, I would turn into a pile of literal, solid mud and quickly crumble into the ground or something. My life was so attached to Mum, I could not imagine living without her. But now I’m writing this? Cleaning dishes? Going back to school? I think something hasn’t clicked yet, and though I no longer believe that mud thing will happen, I suspect a breakdown’s coming soon.
These days, I spend hours going through her pictures. She took so many of them, and I don’t think I’ll ever get through them all because of the sheer quantity. It’s nice to see these photos, but it’s hard to understand how this person who was so alive, in every sense of the word, is now gone. My mother was completely and utterly in love with life. I know she went through moody teenage years, but she developed her ‘live life to the fullest’ attitude not long afterwards and way before she got diagnosed with cancer. Her everlasting positive spirit feels more awake than I’ve ever been. It’s comforting, but also really difficult because I can’t reach out and grab it the way I used to be able to.
I'm still mostly in the early years, but here are some of the pictures I’ve found that make me feel her essence, beyond just smiling for the camera:
