Suddenly, it's five years.
I'm forty-five. Five years is a long time, a considerable chunk of my life. And yet five years is how long I have lived in this world without Mom.
LiFe without her comforting words, her wise counsel, her fiercely-held opinions? It once seemed unbearable. And how I would miss her sense of humor--she could make me laugh anytime I talked to her. She was--and I hesitate to use the term, but there's really no better description--a life force: everyone who came into contact with her was better for knowing her. She was the center of my life, my world, my universe. Life without her would be no life at all.
Still, here we are. Life has gone on, and I might make note of the fact that the first sentence of this paragraph was a lift from the Bob Seger song We've Got Tonight, which has nothing to do with what I'm writing about. In fact, I hate Bob Seger, and I particularly hate that song, and maybe it only popped into my head because I'm trying to think of something, anything, to distract me from the subject at hand, because I don't want to start grieving all over again.
Or maybe it popped into my head because I'm frankly kind of bored. I don't want to be writing another tribute to Mom. What else is there to say? This site came into being as a way of dealing with my grief, but it quickly became something else, because after all, how long could the grieving process last? I still remember so many little details, and still do all I can to honor Mom's memory, but the simple fact is, that memory doesn't mean as much to me now as it once did. It just doesn't. It can't. If it did, I'd live under it every single day, unable to move forward.
It is, after all, the nature of all things to move forward. And so I have--I rarely think of Mom anymore. Life goes on, things in their season, and all that. Letting go is a natural and inevitable part of the process.
Still, something stings my eyes. Couldn't be tears, though. Not after five years.
