It feels like slow drowning.

I appreciate so much the kind notes from my last entry. The ferocity of this grief has really been what has surprised me the most. I find my self feeling disconnected from everyone around me. I find myself angry at life for moving forward. I catch myself just wanting to freeze in place and time because every day is one day further away from her. My mom was my best friend. I spoke to her several times a day. Our relationship had ceased to be that of the typical mother/daughter when I was very young.

My mother had a rough childhood. She married and became a mother young and then, when I was 3, my father died and she became a young single mother. Before I had turned 15 she had lost her husband, her mother, and her only sister. I don’t recall what she was like before my father died but I know something in her snapped when Granny died. That something broke further when she lost her sister. The three years between when my Aunt got sick and died and when I moved out were the worst of our entire relationship. After I moved out we didn’t speak for a year. In many ways I credit that year, and her knowledge that if she was toxic to me I would walk away, to the relationship we built afterwords.

It was hard as she was dying because her tumor reverted her memory back to the time when we didn’t get along. The few months between her first seizure and her death I was already struggling with having lost the relationship I depended on so much. We talked about everything. I was her support and she was mine. When I had my first miscarriage my husband was TDY in Louisiana and I was 19 and alone in NY.  Within hours of my hysterical phone call home my Mom was landing in New York. She immediately left everything, got on a plane, and was there before the sun went down. Shew as my person and I was hers.

Most days I miss her so much I can’t breathe.