Mom's favorite tree was a ginkgo. There was one growing right outside her window. It lost the last of its leaves in the nights before she left us. Like the tree she was ready to shed the old life in preparation for the new.

I talked to her a lot about balance in her last days. The give and take that the universe imposes on us that we can't control. The beauty and the cruelty of it. My mother gave all of herself to help others. It didn't leave enough for her and sometimes not enough for her children. But there was a balance in it. She knew what she was doing and she knew when it was time.

I will never know the version of my mother that all her friends experienced. It is very different from the life we went through together. But I am more than ok with that. She was loving and kind and supportive and all the ugly hard things get to fade away and those beautiful things get to shine. Just like she did. The balance is restored in her memory and all we take with us to this next life without her is the love. That will last forever and goes beyond space and time and this physical world that restrained her from shining as brightly as she deserved to.

Every part of me feels like it's frayed and on fire or like it's been rubbed raw with sandpaper. I told my husband I didn't expect what I am feeling and he looked at me like I was insane for expecting otherwise. He knew me better than I did.

I don't remember how I got from 6:21 yesterday to now. Time passed so slowly and then all of a sudden everything was over. And as my siblings were taking care of all the things you take care of, I was just sitting in her house surrounded by all her things and I think I lost my mind completely for a moment. I felt more panicked and scared than I had in my entire life. I felt so alone even if in reality I wasn't.

Because she was 15 when she brought me here. And she felt like my tie to the world and what kept me connected to everything. To my siblings. To reality. And I felt like I just dropped out with her gone. I was easily left. Like the spare piece of furniture no one knows what to do with. So emotionally raw that being in my presence is just fucking exhausting.

I want to express things and be there for others but I can't right now. And I know realistically no one is expecting me to. But you have all these ideas about how you are going to feel. I had a lot of ideas. They were all wrong and all right. I felt like I was feeling everything all at once. So I am going to hide right now and be safe in my bed under my cats. I hope everyone is ok with that. I can't answer messages or think about memorials. I just keep thinking the blanket they used to cover her was fuzzy and her favorite color and that she was cold when I kissed her goodbye.

My mother was everything bad and good about me. She was my beginning and end and I don't know how to exist without her here yet. I love you all I promise. I'm just trying not to die with her.

A new kind of story

In another life, I was a wedding photographer and I was pretty good at it. It was honestly the best medium for me to tell a story. I’m a very visual person and light, in all it’s incarnations, is magic to me.

I miss it often, but going back to it is not an option. That chapter ended along with a painful part of my story. But growth most often happens in the most painful and visceral ways. There are rarely cameras there to capture those moments.

It’s time to tell stories in a more complete way. My stories. Very few are beautiful, but I hope that changes along the way. I want to find the beauty in the worst of it, if I can.

I hope they will mean something to someone out there as well.

~ a.l.l.