There is a strange assumption people make about grief. They believe that after enough years have passed, the pain somehow expires. That there comes a day when you simply wake up and your loss no longer hurts. But grief does not work that way.
Losing a parent as a child is not something you outgrow. You simply grow around it.
I lost my mother when I was very young. So young that many of my memories of her are scattered pieces rather than complete stories. Yet decades later, I still find myself becoming emotional when I watch other people with their mothers.
It isn’t jealousy.
It isn’t bitterness.
It is something much harder to explain.
It is wondering.
I watch a mother fixing her daughter’s hair before they leave the house. I see a grown woman calling her mother just to ask how long to cook rice. I watch families celebrating birthdays together, and somewhere deep inside me, a quiet question always appears.
How is it okay for a mother to die and leave her child behind?
No matter how much time passes, that question has never really found an answer.
People often say, “She would want you to be happy,” or, “She’s in a better place.” I understand they mean well, but those words don’t remove the reality that there are conversations we never got to have, hugs we never got to share, and milestones she never got to witness.
She wasn’t there when life became difficult.
She wasn’t there when I became a mother myself.
She wasn’t there for the victories, the heartbreaks, the days I desperately needed someone to tell me everything would be okay.
That absence becomes part of your life. You learn to carry it, but carrying something is not the same as no longer feeling its weight.
Grief changes with age.
When you’re a child, you grieve the parent you lost.
As a teenager, you grieve the guidance you never received.
As an adult, you grieve the relationship you never had the chance to build.
And when you become a parent yourself, you grieve all over again because you finally understand just how much love a mother has to give—and how much you missed receiving.
Some people think healing means reaching a place where the sadness disappears.
I don’t believe that.
I think healing is learning that sadness and joy can exist together. You can laugh with your children while quietly wishing they had known their grandmother. You can celebrate your achievements while imagining how proud she would have been. You can build a beautiful life and still miss someone every single day.
There are moments when grief arrives without warning.
A song.
A Mother’s Day advert.
Someone introducing their mum.
A simple phone call you wish you could make.
The tears may not come as often as they once did, but when they do, they remind you that love doesn’t have an expiry date.
Neither does loss.
If you have ever felt guilty because you still miss someone years later, please know this: there is no deadline for missing the people who shaped your life, even if they were only part of it for a short time.
Grief doesn’t measure itself in weeks, months, or years.
It measures itself in love.
And when the love was real, the grief may soften, but it never completely disappears.
Perhaps that isn’t a sign that we haven’t healed.
Perhaps it is simply proof that some people leave footprints on our hearts that time was never meant to erase.
