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It’s a curious thing, to know the exact minute the world stopped for you. I imagine many people have had that pivotal point in their own journeys where everything stops, and the minute you decide to go on living, nothing is ever the same. I think for some this comes on as a gradual phenomenon—maybe the change was a long time coming. But for others like me, I can tell you the date, the time, the location, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the temperature of the air when it happened to me. This Thursday, September 19, 2013, will mark one full, long, agonizing year since I lost my mother. It was ten past nine in the morning when I was delivered the news that would literally stop my world dead in its tracks. My best friend beyond reason, my lifeline, my soul mate was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. Not ever.

Publicly and privately I have struggled these past twelve months. I oftentimes feel too numb to even be sure the grief has arrived. It’s a difficult measure to attempt to make yourself believe that the worst that could happen did happen and there isn’t one thing I can do to change it. One of the worst tricks my brain plays on me is the phone grab game. Each and every day, I have a second, a moment of something crossing my brain that my mom should know, and I pick up my phone to call her or text her. Inevitably this causes my brain to play the second mean trick on me, and the “you know you can’t call her where she is Amy” reality hits.  It can feel fairly maddening on certain days when I’ll do this to myself on multiple occasions.

    My cousin has shared with me this beautiful commentary written by an old man (I’ve seen it referred to as “The Shipwreck”) where he describes death and grief as though you were surviving a shipwreck. It perfectly demonstrates what I feel. At the beginning when the death has occurred, you are lost at sea amidst your own wreckage, barely struggling to stay afloat at all. As time passes, the grief storms come and hit you and shake you and then blow away, leaving you again just trying to float. Big waves and little waves, all depending on where your compass sets you down. I’m still floating and treading water. There are just a lot of things I would like to tell her. If I could get this Reader sent to heaven where I know she is, this is what I would want her to see.

I think I understand now, in parts, why people say everything happens for a reason. I used to look back at my past and think that it’s strange, raised as well as I was, that I did a lot of very adult things and made some very adult mistakes so young.  To spare too many details, I learned a lot of lessons that many people don’t learn until much older, while I was still very young. I had my daughter as a teenager, for example. I always thought, why would I have done so much to grow up so fast? Yet I think now I know. My entire life my mom was with me through thick and through thin. She stood by me through everything I have ever done to see me through it and of course help me see the lessons I would learn at every obstacle. Now I get it. If the world decided I had to lose my mom so young, then it knew I needed to learn those lessons before she left for heaven, so that I could be strong on my own without her. It knew I had to carry on and raise my kids and live my life without my biggest rock to lean on. It would be easy to look back and think , I wish I wouldn’t have put her through so many turbulent years, but I know my mom better than that. She didn’t live with regrets and she loved me in spite of anything. She used every opportunity I barrel rolled at her as a starting point to make me see the error and ultimately the remedy. I would like to tell her that.

    I would also like to tell her that I will do whatever I have to do to get through this. Although I see no end to forever missing her, I want her to know I will carry on and live for her and that she will shine through me. I will do what I have to do for my kids and I will not let her down. I want her to know that I know she’s watching me and that I can hear her voice in my head often, loud and clear. I want her to know that she left me too early but she left me capable, and for that I want to thank her. I would like her to know that although I thought of her manner of death as the cruelest of possibilities, an instantaneous accident that left no chance for a goodbye, I see now that it was the only way it could have happened. If had she been here and death was looming and known, then I wouldn’t have been able to let her go alone. Not without me. I want her to know I forgive her for that.

It’s been in some ways the longest year of my life, and in others it feels like only yesterday I received that earth-shattering news. I love her intensely and I miss her in the most raw of forms. But I know she’s here inside of me, and there she will stay until someday I will see her again.