I think my mom died a year ago today.

I say “think” because the last full day she lived was Tuesday, September 15, 2020. Sometime that night, she died. When we realized what had happened, we called the hospice organization that had been providing home care for her, and they came out and confirmed the death. But it was after midnight by then, so they recorded the date of death as September 16, technically early that Wednesday morning. The 16th was the date, then, that we gave to the papers and put on the headstone and listed on the program for the funeral, but it doesn’t feel like the actual date, not the real one. Because the last time I talked to her was the 15th. That was the last day she did things, the last day she was really living. So there’s the last day of her life, and the day she’s said to have died, and those are two different things, and that’s about as close as I can get to explaining what it’s like to lose your mother. Things that don’t make sense somehow have to.

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I didn’t deliver a eulogy at her funeral. My sister did, and the preacher did; true to form, I wrote down a series of things that made sense in my head but that didn’t really cohere out loud, and I rambled them mostly in order while looking at the paper in my hand, stopping occasionally to skip over a couple because I realized in the moment that even for what I was going through they were too random and directionless.

I’ve looked back at them a few times since—more in the weeks after the funeral, less so now—and seeing them now I’m glad that I wrote them down because I don’t know if I’d be able to remember them all eventually. Your brain becomes an open spigot in the early days of grief, spilling constantly and with no regard for anything, so there’s nothing to do but catch and collect it.

Most of all, though, I’m glad I have them because reading them puts me back in the days right after she died, and it helps me remember her as a person. One of the things about grief and time is that after a while, if you’re not careful, you can start to think of the grief instead of the person you lost, or worse, think of the grief *as* the person and not realize what you’re doing. And I’m always going to miss her. But I don’t want to think of the grief when I think of her. I want to think of her.

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“Your mother has fallen down.”

My dad woke me up in the middle of the night by putting a hand on my shoulder and telling me that, one night when I was visiting home last summer, sleeping on the couch in the living room. Mom had apparently felt like getting something to eat or drink, and she’d made it all the way from the master bedroom to the kitchen, but when she was either standing up to go back to bed or sitting down to eat at the table, she’d fallen. I looked over and saw her lying on her back on the kitchen floor, her arms at her side, looking up and slightly back to see me and dad.

I walked over to her and looked to see what I could do. I didn’t want to have to wait on calling an ambulance for help to right her and get her back to bed, so I stood next to her with my feet apart and squatted at the knee and had her hold onto my arms and neck, and without overthinking it I lifted her straight up and carried her to her nearby chair. She looked at me slightly agog, like I’d just punched through a concrete wall, but she didn’t weigh much by then.

I don’t know if I thought about it at the time, but I wonder now what my dad was thinking when it happened. He has some neurological disorders that affect his movement, so he uses a two-wheeled walker with a built-in seat, and he was sitting in it talking to mom as I lifted and carried her. Was he thinking: I didn’t know he could do that; I didn’t know she would fall; I wish I’d been able to see or stop her before she fell; I should be doing this, not him; I wish I were able to carry her; how much longer; why her; what will I do. I don’t know.

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For some reason the Tift Merritt song “Trouble Over Me” was in my head this morning while I was brushing my teeth, so eventually through association my brain moved on to her song “Virginia, No One Can Warn You.” I’d hummed the chorus two or three times when I remembered that that was what the hospice workers called my mom: Virginia. It was her first name, though her whole life she went by her middle name, Eileen. But they work with hundreds of people and follow the paperwork and so they called her Miss Virginia, even though we told them several times that they could call her Eileen—but anyway, the song was in my head a few minutes before I made the connection and thought of the, what, the coincidence, the synchronicity, the irony, the appropriateness. Did some part of my brain do that on purpose, reaching for it the way a vine stretches toward the sun? Or was it just one of those unexplainable things that we tell ourselves have meaning so that we can try to force order onto an existence that’s determined to deny it?

I think about all these bits and blurbs, these dumb caroming fragments, and it reminds me of the way movies or books can capture that sense of the jagged disconnection of loss, like a chain has slipped its track—and then I think, movies, really? That’s what you’re going with? You’re experiencing a growth and pain that’s rare and special and true in the human life and you’re thinking gee, the movies sure are neat? And then it’s: hey man, lay off, you know how this works: the thoughts ignite and connect and you can’t control them, you just have to follow them and learn from them and make sure that you understand them, or want to. They’re fucking feelings, man. (Then: man, don’t swear in the thing about your mom. Then: though she’d be more ok with it than dad would be.) You’re never still. And so it’s this vortex, this sense of understanding the planets for the first time, how the earth rotates around itself while revolving around a star while being pulled along a still larger path through the galaxy, this nested series of spirals that don’t seem to make sense but that still mean: forward.

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I was awake for more than 24 hours straight the day mom died. You don’t know the day someone dies will be the day they die, of course; it just turns out to be that day. I’d gotten up in the morning and spent the day with my mom and dad and sister like I had the few days before. I was visiting every weekend by then, but this trip I’d actually come out during the week to be there. I don’t know why or how that worked out, and never will. When it became clear that that night would be the night, time stopped having any real weight or meaning, and instead things just felt suspended in some neutral state. After, I drove out to get breakfast for the remaining family, and we ate in a daze. It was morning by then, somehow the next day, although a part of me still felt like it was all one day, continuing. There’s no clear dividing line between her being her and her being gone—or rather, there was, but none of us knew it when it happened. It simply happened. And that’s what it’s like. It happens before you’ve even realized, leaving you not just disoriented but disbelieving, unwilling but forced to rewrite your definition of what’s normal.

The grief is a part of the memory of the person, and it never goes away. More than that, you don’t want it to. You don’t want to be dour or mournful every day, and you won’t be, but you don’t want to ever get to a place where you no longer miss the person who’s gone. That would be true loss, of a kind there’s no recovering from. So you incorporate the grief into the good things, and it all becomes the new memory of the one who isn’t around. You feel awful and wonderful at the same time, sad and happy, regretful and grateful. You start to realize that things that used to seem contradictory can go together; that, in fact, they are part of each other, not two sides of a coin but two halves of a whole. Things that don’t make sense somehow have to, until one day you realize, without seeing it happen, that they do.

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First Steps (originally published 9/15/21)