Losing Mom: A Journey Through Grief (Part 15)

August 14, 2022 (Two Years)

Today is the dreaded day.  Your death day.  The second anniversary of it, no less.  Though somehow, today, I am not particularly overwhelmed by it, yet anyway.  Probably because I have been thinking about it coming up since your birthday.  These two days are so close, it's unfair.  One is meant to celebrate your being brought into this world, and the other, this one, symbolizes you leaving it.  I'm not yet sure how to spin it into a positive day.  I don't know that it needs to be, or ever will be.  If I have learned anything through losing you, and Aunt Diane and Grandma, it's that some things are just sad.  Shitty things exist, and it's okay to call them what they are.  Not everything needs to be spun in a positive light.  

Two whole years though... How can that be?  24 months.  730 days.  All three ways to describe it sound so unbearably long, and yet it feels like you have been gone for an eternity.  With every passing day, it is harder to remember your scent, or your voice, to see you still existing here in your house.  And other days, I swear I just saw you last yesterday.  I can still remember your pink Ludington shirt.  We were wiping down our covid groceries in the breezeway before bringing them inside.  You were perfectly fine.  Healthy.  In good spirits.  Nothing from that day could have me thinking that two days later you'd be dead.  It still makes absolutely no sense.

I miss you fiercely.  Life is so different without you.  You were such a constant for your family, that ever since you died my life has just felt so inconsistent.  I have felt less supported, less seen, less encouraged, less loved.  And that is absolutely not from a lack of trying from friends and family.  But if you have a great relationship with your mother, or a mother figure, you know damn well that no amount of love will ever equate to a mothers.

There is just a giant gaping hole in my heart and my life with your absence.  I know you're still near.  And I know you're at peace in heaven with your parents again, and your wonderful sister.  But it is not nearly the same as being here physically with me, with all of us.  We missed you at Jeremy and Alyssa's wedding.  At Brooke and Owen's.  At every holiday, and every mundane day in between.  Personally, I miss you the most on those mundane days.  I miss going to grandma's house on the weekends and taking hours to pick a fast food restaurant that we know by heart.  I miss just sitting on the couch with you.  I miss driving around in big Bessie and hearing you complain about her, even though she turned out to be reliable until the end.  I miss our cabin trips and our Mackinaw City days and our doing nothing together.  I miss "walking you", because you knew it was good for you but you wouldn't go out yourself.  I feel that all too well now.  I wish you were here to walk me.

Momma, you were the most precious being.  There isn't another soul on earth that I will connect with as much as I did yours.  We were a pair.  I know it's controversial to say this, but I don't care, you were my best friend.  You were my biggest supporter.  My oh my momma, I'm getting emotional now as I type... We didn't have much growing up with you as a single mother, but you're everything we had and needed.  There was no one more special, more selfless, more loving.  There is no one I would be more honored to have as my mother as you.  It was such a gift to be yours.  I know that I still am, but this distance of ours makes it harder to feel.

I wish I could hug you today.  I wish I could squeeze you tight and hold you for a while, and tell you thank you.  Thank you for everything you've ever done for me in my life that I had never previously acknowledged.  And I wish I could say that I'm sorry.  I'm sorry I wasn't the easiest daughter to mother all the time, but we loved each other anyway.  We loved each other through it all.  And I wish I could say that I'm so proud of you.  For all the battles that you did not ask to fight, yet won with grace.   

I was lucky enough to learn a thing or a million from you over the very short 22 years I had you.  I have not yet incorporated most into my daily life, but I find it difficult to be so much like you while the wound of losing you is still so raw.  Maybe someday I will resemble a copied and pasted version of you, and I will feel you beam with pride from heaven.  Or maybe you're already proud of me today.  I'm sure that you are, you always were.  

Now, as I sit here at my dining table crying over my keyboard, I take back my previous statement.  Today is suddenly very overwhelming.  I can't believe it's been 2 years already.  I can't believe I survived at all past that very first day.  Yet here I am.  I suppose there's something to say for that, but I won't.

I love you to the moon and all the stars, my beautiful momma.  I miss you every day we're apart.  Until we meet again.

Your Star,

Sarah <3