On the Permanence of Absence

On losing my mother, the passing of time, and a lifetime of missing her.

I think the cruelest part of losing my mother is knowing that I have to spend the rest of my life without her.

Not a few months. Not a couple of years. The rest of it. There is something particularly devastating about those words. The rest of my life. They sound so ordinary until you realize just how much time they hold. I am twenty-four years old. There are so many things I haven’t done yet. So many places I haven’t been, people I haven’t met, versions of myself I haven’t become. And somehow, I am supposed to experience all of them without the woman who gave me this life in the first place.

I think that’s the part of grief nobody really prepares you for.

People talk about the firsts. The first Christmas, the first birthday, the first anniversary. They warn you about the holidays and the empty chairs and the unexpected moments when a familiar song brings you to your knees. But nobody really talks about the seconds. Or the thirds. Or the ordinary Wednesday, ten years from now, when something wonderful happens and the first person you want to tell has been gone for a decade. Nobody tells you that you will keep getting older while your mother stays the same age forever.

That eventually, the number of years you’ve lived without her will begin to catch up to the number of years you had with her. I don’t know how to make peace with that. I don’t know if I ever will. Sometimes, it still feels like my mother is on vacation. Like she’s gone somewhere for a little while, and eventually she’ll come home. I’ll hear her voice in the other room, or she’ll walk through the door, and everything will go back to the way it was. I know that isn’t going to happen. I’ve known it for two years.

But knowing something and understanding it are two entirely different things.

The first year without her was strange. There were so many moments when I couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened. I knew she had died, but I don’t think I fully understood what forever meant. There was always this feeling that she was just somewhere else, somewhere I couldn’t reach her for the time being.

The second year has been different.

I think the permanence of it all is finally beginning to settle in. The world has continued turning, and I’ve continued living, and she hasn’t come back. There is no trip she’s returning from. No phone call I’ve been waiting on. No amount of time that needs to pass before I get to see her again. And I think that’s what hurts the most about this second year. I’m not just missing my mother anymore. I’m beginning to understand what it actually means to live without her.

I used to think the passing of time would make her absence easier to carry. Instead, sometimes it just makes the distance between us feel greater. Two years ago, I could still say I had spoken to my mother recently. I could remember the sound of her voice without having to think about it. There were things about her that were still part of my everyday life. Now, I’m starting to realize that those memories are becoming older, even as I keep making new ones.

And I hate that.

I hate that time is moving me further away from the last day I had her, even though it’s supposed to be helping me heal. Because I don’t just miss my mother as she was. I miss the mother she would have been to the person I am becoming. I miss the conversations we never got to have. The advice she would have given me. The little things I would have called her about that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone else.

There is a version of me that my mother will never know.

She knew me as her daughter, as the girl I was when she was still here. But there are parts of me that have changed since then. Things I’ve learned, decisions I’ve made, moments I’ve experienced that I wish I could sit down and tell her about. I wonder what she would think of the person I’m becoming. Would she recognize me? Would she be proud of the things I’ve accomplished? Would she notice the ways I’ve changed? I know people would tell me that she would be proud. And maybe she would. But sometimes I don’t want to imagine what she would say. I want to hear her actually say it.

I want to tell her something and hear her response. I want her opinion, even if it’s one I don’t agree with. I want to complain about my day and have her listen. I want to call her for absolutely no reason at all. I want the ordinary things back. And perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is that life keeps happening anyway.

The seasons change. People get married. Babies are born. I go to work, come home, make plans, laugh at things I find funny. Sometimes I have entire days that are genuinely good. And then, somewhere in the middle of being happy, I remember.

She’s still gone.

She will still be gone tomorrow.

And every tomorrow after that.

I think there’s a particular loneliness that comes with losing your mother young. You find yourself standing at the beginning of adulthood, looking at all the years ahead of you, knowing that the person you thought would be there to help you navigate them is already gone.

There are so many things I still need my mother for. And I think that’s something people misunderstand about grief. They assume that because you’ve survived the worst thing, you’ve somehow learned how to live with it.

But surviving something and accepting it are not the same thing. I can get out of bed every morning. I can go to work. I can laugh with my friends and make plans for the future. I can do everything I’m supposed to do and still feel, somewhere underneath it all, that something is terribly wrong.

Because something is.

My mother is dead, and the world has somehow decided that life should continue as though that isn’t the most extraordinary and impossible thing that has ever happened to me. I think I used to believe that grief was something you eventually moved through. That one day, the sadness would become small enough to tuck away somewhere, and life would begin to resemble what it had been before.

But I’m beginning to understand that there is no before to return to. There is only this life. The one I had with her, and the one I have to figure out without her. And as the years go by, I know there will be more birthdays she doesn’t celebrate with me, more holidays without her at the table, more ordinary afternoons when I wish I could pick up the phone.

There will be milestones she doesn’t witness and stories I never get to tell her. There will be versions of myself that exist only because I’ve had to learn how to live without her. Maybe someday I’ll become better at carrying that knowledge. Maybe the thought of all those years ahead won’t feel quite so unbearable.

But right now, in this second year without my mother, I’m beginning to understand something I wish I didn’t have to.

I don’t just have to get through another birthday without her, or another Christmas, or another anniversary.

I have to get through the rest of my life.

And I wish, more than anything, that the rest of my life could have included her.