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One Year Later
On the first anniversary of losing my mom
It’s been a year now.
I just reread the essay I wrote six months in — I hadn’t read it again since I posted it.
What can I add now? It’s all still true. But more time has passed; the raw edges are a bit less raw. I don’t keep getting startled by her absence, the “missing step” of wanting to tell her something and forgetting I can’t. I haven’t had a dream about her in quite a while.
Yesterday was weirder than today, I think; the anticipation of “anniversary syndrome” was worse than the reality. Today, I talked to my brother, and to my stepdad.
We’re all doing fine.
We all still miss her.
I wish she could have visited this house. We moved here before she died, but it’s a long ways to come — a flight and a drive and a ferry and more driving — and she was already sick, although we didn’t know the cancer was going to be terminal. We were all still living in the universe where there was going to be chemo, and surgery, and some complicated…
