Life Without Mother

Dear Mom,

You’re gone. Not on this earth anymore. Never coming back. Never walking through my bedroom door again. Never listening to my random stories about my day. Never snuggling up on the couch with me. Never singing “You Are My Sunshine” to me. Never saying how much you love me and are proud of me. I’m not going to see you for as long as God has me on this earth.
It finally hit me as I packed for college. Pain that I hadn’t felt yet took over, coursing through my body and causing me to tighten my fists around the shirt that I was supposed to be folding. My eyes squeezed shut and my teeth ground together against the horrible ache in my heart I had never felt before and couldn’t have imagined possible.
My imagination was what had prevented the finality of your death from clicking in my mind, the vivid memory of you always ever present the past four months. As I packed however, my imagination couldn’t make real the image of you opening my door to help me pack. I couldn’t imagine it because we had never been through me moving out. Would we have shed tears? Would you have packed half of my things? Would we have talked about the future or the past, anticipating or reminiscing?
I couldn’t imagine, because it hit me that I wouldn’t hear your heavy, on-a-mission step in the hall that I knew so well or see your loving, make-sure-everything-is-clean eyes come through that bedroom door again.
Gosh it’s hard. The hardest is that I think I’ve at last reached a place where I can let go of the pain and anger at our past. The times when you unintentionally hurt me and I didn’t have the mom from my childhood to take me through my early teens.
Watching an old home video from when I was a baby (before Hope was born) reminded me of you before the messy times when I began to think I wasn’t as important or that you were going through enough without me unloading my burden of loneliness on you. It reminded me of when you weren’t struggling and were able to be there completely for us, with us being your job, your purpose in this world. Then I was able to see that you were that same mom in this past year as you were then (though slightly older). You put everything you had into spending time with us and especially in making my senior year awesome. I now see you without the fog of the past blurring the who you were as our mom–a loving, supportive, joyful, servant of Christ and prime example of a godly woman.
Now I miss what we could have had and I will never have–the opportunity to build a friendship with the mother that left an impact on every life she touched.
The fact is, it wrenches my heart every time I remember that I can’t just call you up on Wednesday after my first day of school to tell you those random stories or my thoughts or college or to ask for advice. I can never do that.
During one of the get-to-know-you hangouts at the beach retreat I went to, the question was asked, “if you could have a snack with any person, who would it be and what would the snack be?” (Or something to that effect.)
My answer (which probably just seemed sappy to the girls there) was, “I would have milk and cookies with my mom.”
Of course if they knew that you are not available to do that with, they’d understand a bit better. Because I was not trying to be all goody-two-shoes or anything. It’s the truth. Just to tell you how much I love you and all that you mean to me and to get that further last minute advice. I miss you an awful lot, Mom.

Your daughter,
Hannah