Rooted in Love and Grief | Losing My Mother, 24 Years Later
There are anniversaries the calendar remembers for us, even when we try not to.
Dates that arrive quietly, but carry a weight we can feel before we even name it. They don’t ask permission before stirring the ache. They just show up—steady, familiar, and a little bit heavy in the chest.
Twenty-four years. That’s a long time to live without a mother. And also a long time to keep loving one.
Grief Is a Root
I used to think grief was something to get through. Something to survive, endure, and eventually set down like a heavy suitcase at the end of a long trip. I thought healing meant moving on. But now I understand it differently.
Grief is not something you finish. It’s something you carry. Not like a burden—but like a root.
Grief is a root.
It goes deep, quietly threading itself into the soil of who you are. It anchors you to what mattered—and still matters. It holds you in place when everything else feels like it’s shifting.
Because love doesn’t disappear just because someone does.
Love, Changed but Not Gone
It changes shape.
It softens and sharpens all at once. It shows up in unexpected places—in the way you mother your own children, in the songs that catch you off guard, in the moments you wish you could call someone who isn’t there to answer.
There are still days I reach for her without thinking.
Days when I want her voice, her advice, her presence—like muscle memory that never quite fades. And there are other days when the grief sits quieter, more like a hum beneath everything else. Still there. Always there. Just less loud.
Learning to Live Alongside It
Time doesn’t erase grief. It reshapes it.
It teaches you how to live alongside it. How to laugh again without feeling like you’re betraying something sacred. How to build a life that holds both joy and longing in the same breath.
Because that’s what this is, really— not moving on, but moving forward with.
What Grief Has Taught Me
Grief has made me softer in some places, stronger in others.
It has taught me how to notice people. To sit with them in their hard moments without rushing them through. To understand that some things don’t need fixing—they just need witnessing.
It has taught me that love doesn’t end. It roots.
Still Rooted, Still Loved
And once something is rooted in you, it becomes part of the landscape of your life.
There is no version of me without her. Even now. Especially now.
Twenty-four years later, I am still shaped by her love. Still anchored to her in ways I don’t always see, but always feel.
Grief, it turns out, is not the opposite of healing. It is evidence of love that had somewhere to go—and chose to stay. So I don’t try to outrun it anymore.
I let it be what it is: a root beneath the surface, holding me steady.
A quiet reminder that I loved and was loved deeply. And that kind of love doesn’t disappear.
It grows.
