A Time for Everything
Forty days from today will be the eighth anniversary of my mother's death. As of today, I have lived without her for 2,880 days. How is this even possible? I miss her every single day. Some days, like certain anniversaries (her birthday is the absolute hardest for some reason, with the day of her death a close second), the loss crashes down on me anew, the weight of it huge and consuming and unmanageable all over again. Right around this time every year, my heart becomes tender, tears are always waiting, and my mind wanders back to her last days. I have learned over these last 2,880 days that I must anticipate all of this and prepare for each of these painful days. While my relationship with my mother became more complicated the older I got (whose doesn't?), my favorite times to remember with her are when I was very little. Before her marriage crumbled, before the world beat us both down, before we both got lost. When I was very little, my dad would go to work, and my mother
