Sometimes – and the timing is usually very odd — I feel so inherently like my mother’s daughter. It isn’t often. But I feel her spirit in me, I see her influence in how I live my life and make my choices.  I marvel at how who she was, and how she lived her life, molded my brain and gave me a sense of right and wrong, morality and values, what life is all about.  It becomes very clear when looking at how other people make choices, how they behave and how that is in stark contrast to how I live my own life.

She was sort of marvelous in every way.  And I don’t know how she did it.  How she always found the positive, how she always smiled.  How she contemplated information and offered sane, candid and thoroughly considered opinions about everything.  I think about how much she loved to cook, even when she couldn’t taste food anymore because the chemo had killed her taste buds and left her mouth painful and raw.  I think about her pure joy in discovering new things, or seeing a hummingbird feed in the boughs of the backyard trees.  I think about how much she knew — just, SO much.  I will never accumulate that knowledge, or be able to put it in context and use it to make arguments the way she could.  I think about how many people’s lives she not only touched, but positively influenced.  So far beyond influencing her son and daughter — influencing and helping other people’s sons and daughters, advocating for people whose voices weren’t as loud and articulate at hers, offering kindness and solace for a multitude of heartaches.  My mother was gentle, and deft and could read a room in an instant, could read the people surrounding her, and she made everyone feel heard and seen and important and wise and thoughtful … even if maybe, we weren’t.

She could have been broken.  She could have been angry at the hand life dealt her at such a young age, when her first husband was tragically killed in a drunk driving accident.  She could have harbored resentment and bitterness her entire life (and maybe she did) that such cruelty found her at the tender age of 22. But … that wasn’t the person I knew my mother to be.

My mother was married to my father for forty-five years.  They had two children and they raised us well.  We never wanted for anything, we traveled the world.  They exposed us to so many different things.  I carry all those memories with me every day.  I give my dad a hug, and kiss his scratchy cheek (he has stopped shaving every day since my mother died … I think it is his treat to himself) and I feel beyond lucky for the two people who raised me and gave me the gifts they gave me.  I am inherently my father’s daughter.  That has never been in question.  But when I see my mother’s eyes looking back at me in the mirror, or look down and see her hands typing, my heart swells with such gratitude and love … and pain that she is gone and I (and my brother) are all that is left of her.

It doesn’t matter how much time has passed since we lost her.  It doesn’t matter that time-very insensitively — marches steadfastly forward, and I have to experience things without her.  The pain is real, it is immediate, the sense of loss is one of the real-est things I’ve every grappled with.  Sometimes I need her so much I think my heart will stop beating with the squeezing pain.  I look into the nothingness, into the void, and wonder how I will possibly cope without her to tell me what to do.  How will I continue to move forward without her guidance?  It is an unanswerable question.

And it’s then that I see her in me.  That I feel her voice in my soul.  That I remember that she made me, and that the answers are there.  They just aren’t as easy to find.

Mama Bear, I am doing my best.

xox, g