Number 8 Without Her

This Will Be My 8th Mother’s Day Without Her

Tomorrow, I will wake up for the eighth Mother’s Day in a row unable to call my mother and hear her voice.

Eight.

That number still feels strange to write because grief does that. It makes time pass and stand still at the same time. It has the nerve to keep moving the calendar forward while leaving certain rooms in your life untouched.

And Mother’s Day is one of those rooms.

It is a day that lets me reflect on how wonderful of a mother I had, while also reminding me how intensely I miss that wonderful mother.

That is the bittersweet pain of it.

You get gratitude and grief in the same breath.

Love and loss in the same sentence.

Memory and ache sitting at the same table.

She taught me more than she probably knew….

I remember my mother telling me to take everyone on a case-by-case basis.

That stayed with me.

A simple sentence with deep wisdom.

Not everybody deserves the same access.

Not everybody should be handled the same way.

Not everybody means well just because they are smiling.

Not everybody gets the same version of you.

She taught me discernment before I had language for it.

I remember her showing me what capacity looked like every single day too.

Not through speeches.

Not through big dramatic moments.

Through living.

Through what she carried.

Through how she showed up.

Through the thousand ordinary things that become sacred after somebody is gone.

That is one of the hardest parts of grief. You realize how much of your life was shaped by someone who made it look normal while they were doing it.

She believed in me loudly…..

I remember her being there when I got my Bachelor’s and my Master’s degree.

I did not have some huge cheering section, and honestly, I did not need one.

She was there.

My father was there.

My now-wife was there.

That was enough.

Their youngest son graduated, and they got to see it.

There is something about having the right people in the room that makes the room feel full enough.

And my mother didn’tjust attend, she believed in me out loud.

She set the bar so high that even I wondered if I could reach it.

That kind of belief does something to a person. It gets in your bones, and becomes part of the internal voice you hear when life gets hard. Even now, when I am pushing myself, stretching, building, trying, risking, part of me is still responding to the standard she saw in me long before I fully saw it in myself.

That is one of the gifts a good parent leaves behind.

They become part of your inner architecture.

She taught me not to think small…..

I remember her taking me to the suburbs and nicer neighborhoods in the city.

Just us driving around, house watching, and talking.

That memory is so vivid to me because it was not fancy. It was just a mother planting possibility in her son while the car moved through streets he had not yet imagined for himself.

She told me:

“You can have all the nice things you want and live and travel to wherever you want. Never limit yourself.”

That still sits with me.

Because she was not just talking about houses.

She was talking about mindset and worth.

She was talking about giving myself permission.

She was talking about refusing to let your current environment become your permanent ceiling.

A lot of people never get that from home.

I did, and I know that mattered.

Coffee, memory, and the quiet things that stay….

I remember going over there some mornings just to have coffee with her.

Truth be told, to this day I rarely, if ever, drink coffee.

But the smell of it? It still soothes me.

That is how grief works too. It hides in the senses.

A smell.

A sound.

A chair.

A phrase.

A street.

A shirt.

A silence.

And suddenly you are not just remembering. You are revisiting.

Memories like these can be so rich in texture.

That is why people who have not lost a parent in this way sometimes do not fully understand. Grief is not always loud. Sometimes it is a scent in the morning that reaches into years you thought you had folded away neatly.

This is a club nobody wants membership in…..

There are some losses that make you feel older in a day.

Losing a parent is one of them.

This is a club nobody should ever want membership in.

Your parents typically raise you to prepare for everything except how to live without them.

They teach you how to cross the street.

How to work.

How to carry yourself.

How to survive hard things.

How to keep going.

How to think.

How to pray.

How to handle people.

But they cannot really teach you how to exist in a world where they are no longer in it.

That lesson is brutal and hands-on.

And for many of us, it arrives before we are ready.

The day she died still lives close…..

The day my mother passed is a perfect six months from the day she was born.

Even writing that feels cruel in a way only life can be.

I remember that day like yesterday.

It still haunts me.

I remember how cold her hand was.

I remember the shirt I wore. It still hangs in my closet, worn maybe once more since.

I remember the day she died. I was sitting in the room where it happened, looking at the now empty bed.

I sat in a chair at her bedside.

My father stood in the doorway staring at that same bed.

Then he asked me a question I will never forget:

“What are we gonna do?”

And the most honest answer of my life came out.

“I don’t know.”

That was it.

No speech.

No big son moment where I rose above the reality of it.

Just the truth.

I did not know.

The air conditioner filled the silence that stayed behind.

That silence is still one of the loudest things I remember.

Grief changes shape, but it does not ask permission…..

Eight years later, grief does not feel exactly the way it did then.

It has changed shape.

It is less of a constant open wound and more like an ache that knows where to find me. It shows up on birthdays, holidays, milestones, random mornings, and memories I did not ask for.

It shows up when I wish I could tell her something.

When I wonder what she would say now.

When I think about how proud she would be.

When I need her voice and have to settle for my memory of it.

That is one of the strangest parts of grief. You do keep living. You do keep building. You do keep moving forward. But there are certain people you never really move on from.

You move with the loss.

You carry it differently.

You make room around it.

You learn its patterns.

But you do not defeat it.

Not when the love was real.

What a good mother leaves behind….

My mother left behind more than memories.

She left language.

Standards.

Vision.

Belief.

Example.

Permission.

Warmth.

A way of looking at life that still reaches for me.

She is part of the reason I think the way I think.

Part of the reason I keep going.

Part of the reason I push myself.

Part of the reason I do not like small thinking.

Part of the reason I try to see people clearly.

That is the sacred part of grief.

The person may be gone, but what they built in you keeps living.

Not perfectly.

Not painlessly.

But truly.

Mother’s Day is both gift and wound….

That is probably the cleanest way I can say it.

Mother’s Day is both gift and wound.

A gift because I had a mother worth missing this deeply.

A wound because I cannot call her and tell her that.

And I know I am not the only one waking up tomorrow carrying that kind of ache.

Some people will post photos.

Some will buy flowers.

Some will celebrate at brunch.

Some will smile through tears.

Some will avoid the day completely.

Some will sit with gratitude.

Some will sit with anger.

Some will sit with absence.

Grief does not move the same in everybody.

But if you are missing your mother tomorrow, I think one of the hardest truths is this:

You can be thankful for who she was and still be devastated that she is gone.

Those two things do not cancel each other out.

They live together.

Final thought

Tomorrow will be my eighth Mother’s Day without her.

And if I am honest, some part of me still cannot believe I live in a world where that sentence is true.

But I do.

So tomorrow I will remember her.

I will remember the coffee.

The car rides.

The degrees.

The belief.

The voice.

The bar she set.

The way she widened my vision.

The way she mothered in both word and example.

And I will also miss her beyond words… and so deeply.

Because grief is not disloyal to healing.

Missing her is not a sign that I have not moved forward.

It is a sign that she mattered and still does.

And if you are carrying that kind of loss too, then you already know:

Love does not end when a life does.

Sometimes it just becomes memory with a pulse.