The Last Page

Loss and grief are so intricately tied to each other, yet they don’t always occur at the same time. I’ve learned this only recently.

You see, my mom and I had what you might call a parting of ways many, many years ago. This is a long story with many chapters; chapters that will surprise you and stir you with their stories of sadness, pain, and unbelievable choices, but that’s a story for another day and a much longer read.

Today, you get the end of that story, the last page of the last chapter of the book I haven’t yet written. My mom, at the too young age of 57, passed away yesterday. After two decades of fighting chronic illness and auto immune disease, two weeks of thinking the time may be near, and two days of feeling the weight of imminent loss, she gave up the fight and laid down the weight she’d been carrying for far too long.

I lost my mother many years ago. Today, I finally grieve that loss that I now know I had never fully accepted. Writing and sharing my pain and vulnerabilities has always felt healing to me, so I write this now to say that I am hurting. I am hurting far more than I ever thought I would. I am sad. I am far more sad than I ever thought I’d be. I regret. I regret things in a way that I never thought I could.

There’s so much that I don’t understand about the decisions she made and the way she lived her life, and now I’ll never know. What I do know, what I’m trying to hold hard against my heart, is that she did the best she thought she could, and that’s the only thing that really matters now.

Like all of us, she had her demons and her darkness, but she also had more light and more laughter and more silliness that anyone I know. From her, I learned to never be afraid of adventure, to never say no to a road trip, to never hesitate to do something silly because of what others might think, to never stay in one place too long and miss out on all the rest, and to give love fully without hesitation or expectation.

This photo is one of the few that I have ever seen of us together as adults. It reminds me of brighter days, and it makes me both happy and terribly sad to think of the day it was taken, a day of sharing an outdoor concert together, wine glasses in hand and dancing in the grass without our shoes. I think I’ll try my best to remember her this way.