Today marks one year since my mom died.
In some ways, it feels like it’s been maybe a handful of months but in other ways, it feels like it’s been forever. I still think about my mom every day and I miss her. I miss being able to talk to her, I miss just the comfort and security of knowing that the person who loved me unconditionally from the moment I was born is in this world with me.
I think of dealing with grief is like a tree that grows around a foreign object. It’s an injury to the tree when it encounters such a thing. Like the tree in this picture, the wall literally splits the tree into a “before” and “after”, causing damage and distress, until the tree grows past it and knits itself back together. It still bears the scars of the experience and although the wall hasn’t changed at all, the tree heals itself around it and the wall simply becomes a part of it.
Like the wall in the image below, my grief hasn’t gotten smaller. It’s just that over the course of the last year, life has inevitably moved on, as it does, and my life has grown and developed around that injury, which is now part of me.
There are so many times still that I want to call my mom and share some news or just talk to her about my day. Times when I think how proud she would be of my kids as they continue to navigate their way through young adulthood and it saddens me that she’s not here to see it. I often wonder what she would think about certain things and I imagine her reaction to others.
I came across the image below that one of my friends on Facebook posted and it resonated.
I believe that missing my mom will shadow me for probably the rest of my life but my hope is that the grief will consume less volume in my life as time marches on.
But Mom, I sure do miss you.
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