The First One

I thought I was ready for this one. I'm not.

I have been through enough loss to know that grief doesn’t follow a calendar. I know it shows up sideways, in grocery stores and in the middle of sentences you didn’t mean to start. I know it doesn’t ask permission.

But I still thought I was ready.

I was not ready.

My mother died last July. It was sudden and it wasn’t, cancer has a way of doing that. And here I am, ten months later, walking into my first Mother’s Day without her, feeling something I did not expect: the specific ache of all the things she didn’t get to see.

In March, I gave a TEDx talk. I stood on a stage I never thought I’d reach and said out loud the things I had been afraid to say for years. She would have cried. She would have called everyone she knew and told them, probably with some small exaggeration about the size of the room. I gave the talk without her in the audience and tried not to let the absence be louder than the moment.

In a few weeks, I receive an honorary doctorate and give the commencement speech. The kind of thing she would have insisted on framing. I am going to walk across that stage and think about her sitting somewhere I can’t see.

And then there is the farm.

She never got to see Dragonfly Farm. She never met Daisy, who belongs to my neighbors and comes to the fence every time she sees me, just looking for a little love. She never walked the property or touched the peonies that are just now starting to make their presence known. When we were naming this place, I asked for a sign. A dragonfly appeared, as it always does from her when I ask. I took it. I still take it.

There is something about Mother’s Day I didn’t understand until this year. It is not just a day about being a mother or having one. It is a day that measures distance. The distance between who you were when she was here and who you are now, finding your way without her. The distance between the moments she witnessed and the ones she missed.

She missed some big ones. She is going to keep missing them.

I don’t have a tidy close for this one. I just wanted to write it down while it still felt true, before I found the more composed version. Some of you are in this with me, your first year or your fifth or your twentieth without someone who should have been here. I see you.

The peonies are coming up. I think she’d like that part.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie