There's a photo that’s fascinated me since the first time I saw it. It's of my mom on her fourth birthday, which I know because of the inscription on the back. She’s nuzzling her own mother, both of them seated on the stage of a sixties-era venue, and my grandmother is gazing into the distance with a smile. It’s a very sweet moment. It’s also a very strange photo for me, because I never knew them like this. The relationship I knew of my mom and her mom was one of seething anger (my grandma’s) and constant hurt and defensiveness (my mom’s.) Theirs was a pain that began long before I arrived, but that cast a shadow over my childhood, and everything in my mother’s life.
The Journal I Found After My Mom Died - How We Can Keep Writing Through Grief
After my mom died, I found an old journal we’d shared when I was sixteen. It was buried beneath the clutter of my childhood bedroom, which I cleaned out after she died. I noticed that I'd been the last to write, never passed it back, and the journal had eventually been forgotten about and shoved beneath my bed. It felt like yet another thing I could guilt myself over, which was something I did a lot in those early days. But through that fog I had an idea…
Lessons From Regret: Do It Anyway (A Poem)
In the months before my mom died she fell in love with a poem. This poem was called “Do It Anyway.” She asked if I would find a way to paint it up on her bedroom wall, and I told her that I would. I thought it sounded nice and totally planned on it, but of course life was busy…and I didn’t get to it. This was one of the many things that haunted me after her death. Here’s how I moved past this regret and remind myself to “do it anyway.”