Grieving the death of a mother

How do I live with what I never got to say?

For most people here the last time was ordinary, a phone call laughing about comedy skits on television, a normal week before the holidays, and only afterward did it become the last time. What they carry is not a wrong they did but a thing left unsaid or undone: never having said I love you out loud, not spending more of the time there was, the wish to have saved her.

Nobody here found out whether she knew; the ones years on still ask it on her birthday and in the week she died, and the asking has become part of how they keep her. A few name the hardest part exactly: not the death but the impossibility of going back, of hugging the person once more the way they used to, with most of it never recorded.

What this light holds instead of an answer is company: the same regret in several people who loved their mothers plainly and had no warning, which is its own evidence that the unsaid thing was not a failure of love.

Is it wrong that I can't cry, or can't talk about it?

Several people here did not respond the way they expected to: no tears at a mother's death or a father's or a brother's, an hour of silence before answering a simple question, a card sent in place of words, a refusal to go that deep right now.

The ones without tears asked whether that made them heartless, and whether they still knew themselves; the ones without words used what was at hand, a memorial card whose printed lines said what they could not.

What they share is that the grief was there in a form other than the expected one, in missing her years later, in a hard month every year, in being unable to speak of it yet, and none of them stopped grieving for lack of the form. Nobody here was pushed into the deep water and came out better for it; the ones who set a limit, not right now, kept the loss where they could carry it.

This light holds no one who says the absence of tears meant the absence of love; it holds people still missing a mother twenty years on without ever having cried the way they thought they should.

Does the missing ever stop?

Not for anyone here: two years on, twenty years on, they still miss her and still notice her absence, and several say the missing is simply part of how they live now. It comes back hardest on the calendar, her birthday, the week before the holidays that turned out to be the last week, and it comes back sideways too, after a medical procedure, when a son leaves for college, when several losses arrive at once.

What changed with time was not the missing but what sits beside it: her laughter remembered and not only her absence, the regret held at arm's length when it has to be, a cat that comes to visit at the right moment. The people here who lost more than one person say the losses do not take turns; they arrive together and each brings the others back.

None of them would tell you when it gets easier; what they would tell you is that it did not stop them from loving her, and that missing her turned out to be a way of keeping her.