09/05/2026
One year ago today, I washed my mother’s lifeless body, massaged shea butter into her skin, lovingly dressed her in one of her favorite cotton gowns, and whispered prayers of safe travels to her departing soul.
Grief has a strange way of making time feel both impossibly fast and unbearably slow. How has it already been a year? 365 days? It feels like I’ve lived through several different versions of myself since September 5, 2025.
Learning how to sit with grief, and how to hold memories without allowing them to swallow me whole, has been arduous work.
I survived so many firsts without her.
My first birthday. My first Mother’s Day. My first New Year. And perhaps one of the hardest things was watching the world keep moving when my entire world had completely changed.
That’s the strange thing about grief, it doesn’t stop life. Life keeps happening alongside it. And somewhere in the middle of all that living, I realized I wasn’t simply enduring the loss of my mother, I was being reshaped by it.
I found wounds in myself that needed tending. I found strength I didn’t know I had. I learned how to choose myself differently. I learned how to let people go. I learned how to sit with myself. I learned that I could fall apart and still find my way back to myself.
Today is a significant milestone and I can finally say this without minimizing how hard it has been; I survived my first year without my mother...
Not perfectly.
Not gracefully.
Not without breaking down.
Not without questioning myself.
Not without moments when the grief completely knocked the wind out of me, but I survived.
And I’m still here.
Today, I’m not only remembering my mother, I'm honoring her life. I’m honoring her memory and I’m honoring the woman I have become while learning how to live in a world without her physical presence in it.
Through all the breaking, rebuilding, grieving, growing, releasing, and becoming… I am learning how to make a home within myself.
Mommy, I love you.🌹
