My mom would be 73 today. I took the day off. I’m going to fertilize and trim my houseplants and think about her (she loved to fertilize and prune).
I don’t have many words of my own today, but I’ve been sitting on a Cheryl Strayed newsletter–a reprint of an old Sear Sugar column–for a few weeks now. Every single one of her newsletters destroy me but this one particularly, about living with loss and making a home in grief, didn’t leave a thing standing. It’s beautiful, though. If you have lost a loved one, read it. And know that I’m thinking about you.
Thirty years gone and my mother is always with me. Thirty years gone and I still ache for her every day. Thirty years gone and my sorrow has sweetened into gratitude. How lucky I am to have been her daughter. To still be. To feel her shimmering in my bones with every step. […]
It’s your life. The one you must make in the obliterated place that’s now your world, where everything you used to be is simultaneously erased and omnipresent […] It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother.