A hopeful, honest reflection on losing my mom at ten, turning twenty without her, and learning to grow with grief.
Trigger Warning: This piece discusses grief and the loss of a parent. If that feels too tender or overwhelming right now, please take care of yourself first and feel free to skip this one.
A note before we begin: What follows is drawn entirely from my own experience navigating loss. This isn’t professional advice, just one person’s messy, imperfect journey through grief. If you’re looking for clinical guidance or therapeutic support, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional.
The Ordinary Places Grief Lives
A few years ago, a friend once asked me if I was a “mommy’s girl.” I paused, smiling politely, deciding whether to tell the truth. The question was innocent, the kind of thing people toss out during a casual conversation without thinking twice. I could have laughed and said “definitely,” or “not really.” Instead, I took a breath and said the thing that never feels simple. “My mom died when I was ten.”
The table went quiet for a beat, the awkward silence hanging in the air above us.
That’s how it happens, when grief slips quietly into ordinary moments and asks whether you will name it or let it pass by.
There have been smaller moments, too. In middle school, I asked a friend to borrow her mascara, and she shook her head. Her mom had warned her that sharing mascara can spread eye infections like pink eye. The advice was kind and practical, but it stung. My mom hadn’t lived long enough to teach me everyday lessons about makeup, dating, or how to press a shirt before an interview. I laughed it off, then realized that much of growing up happens in the tiny instructions that never arrived for me.
Years later, in my dorm, I kept rehearsing how to tell new friends about my mom, waiting for the moment that felt natural and never finding it. One night, we sat cross-legged on the floor with bowls of ramen, and the words finally came. The room stayed the same, the conversation moved on, and my chest loosened with an exhale I had been holding on to for far too long.
Those moments started to mark time in their own way, and they carried me to this fall.
On Oct. 22 of this year, I crossed a strange line. I have now lived more life without my mother than with her. I have to remember her for longer than I ever knew her.
I used to think grief would fade with time, but I have learned it only changes shape, learning you as you learn it.
The Year Everything Changed
This October marked ten years since my mother died. She was forty-three. I was ten. It happened suddenly, turning the familiar map of our lives into something new and hard to read.
Her obituary captured her exactly: when she said she was in, she was ‘all in.’ She filled a room with warmth. She showed up for people. She made ordinary days feel like events.
After she died, everyday objects began to take on new significance. The October sky goes a flatter kind of blue, the firewood smells more aggressive, and I notice I don’t mind when the air turns a little colder. The month drifts in, a bit chillier, a bit quieter, and I find myself feeling strange before I remember why. It could be memory, or maybe it is my body remembering before my mind does.
Ten years of that is its own kind of education. So now, in her honor, I am sharing ten lessons from a decade of missing her. I hope they make someone else feel a little less alone.
Because what is grief, if not love preserving?
Ten Lessons a Decade of Grief Taught Me
1. Anniversaries Don’t Get Easier, But They Get Clearer
Grief has a range. Some days it’s a slow Sunday morning; other days, it’s a surprise thunderstorm that forgot to check your schedule. The week leading up to the date can carry the most weight. Every song feels wrong, small talk feels thin, and familiar places buzz with a kind of emotional static, as if the whole world knows something you’re trying not to remember.
The lesson is preparation with kindness. You know the buildup is coming, so admit it early. Make gentle plans and set aside something small that feels grounding, like a night walk or a favorite dessert. Give yourself room to feel ridiculous amounts or absolutely nothing at all, without insisting it looks like “proper” grief.
And sometimes you’ll feel less than you expected. You’ll sail past a birthday one year and remember it sharply the next. That’s not failure; that’s a nervous system doing its best. Clarity is kinder than pressure. Let memory and mourning share the same table, and try to meet the day with something resembling a steady hand, even if you’re faking it a little.
2. Time Doesn’t Heal, It Teaches
People say time heals all wounds. It doesn’t always, but it does teach you how to carry them.
My mother stands still so I can see how far I’ve come. She is frozen in memory, but I keep moving. And maybe that’s what healing really is, learning to walk beside the version of love that memory left behind.
Let time be a teacher, not a judge. Notice what soothes you and what stings. Learn the difference between a wave you can ride and an undertow that asks you to rest. Build small rituals that help you return to yourself. That is what healing looks like.
3. You Can Grow Up Without Guidance, But It Hurts
Milestones land differently when the person who should be there is missing. School dances, first heartbreaks, graduation, and college move-in day. Moments that should be call-your-mom moments become harsh reminders instead.
So make meaning anyway. Write the vows you wish she could hear. Save her a seat in your mind. I now must remember her longer than I knew her, and that hurts, yet the ache is also why I will cry at my wedding, pause when I hold my first child, and feel a steady peace that real love does not vanish.
This pain gives you a feeling rather than numbness, memory rather than erasure, and gratitude for what shaped you.
4. The World Doesn’t Pause for Your Grief, But You Can
After loss, life keeps moving in a way that can feel cruel. Classes go on, friends laugh, the world spins.
Give yourself the permission to step out of that rhythm. Take a nap. Ask for an extension. Say no to plans. Your grief is valid even years later, and people will often give grace when you ask for it.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is lie down and try to sleep before you come apart. Rest is not quitting. Rest is care. You are allowed to stop for breath, even when the world does not.
5. Lean on your people
When I got to college, no one knew about my grief, and I felt like I was carrying a secret burden. Sharing changed that. It made my grief soften. My roommate became an anchor, my friends an extension of home, and I learned that love does not vanish just because its source has changed.
Through it all, my dad has been a steady ground. Losing her drew us closer in ways I never expected; he became both parent and partner in grief, fluent in the silences. Some nights we said nothing and let the quiet speak, and I learned that love can be authentic without words.
If my mom were still here, I don’t know if I would understand him the way I do now. Our bond was forged in loss, the strength that carried us, and he shows me that family is not only where you come from but who stays when the world changes.
The lesson is simple but powerful: let people show up for you. Tell the truth to someone safe and ask for help when the weight feels unbearable. Grief may begin as something you carry alone, but healing takes shape in company. In the end, it’s the ordinary care from ordinary people that keeps you afloat.
6. Grief Makes You Grow Up Too Fast
I became the girl who grew up too fast, which sounds poetic until you realize it mostly means you know where the funeral home is before you know where homeroom is. That’s what grief does: it makes you wise in ways no one actually wants to be wise.
Losing a parent young gives you a kind of emotional depth your peers can’t quite relate to. You learn empathy before you learn geometry. You become the friend people call when something terrible happens, because you know how to sit in the wreckage without trying to glue everything back together with inspirational quotes.
The lesson is to notice the strengths grief gave you when you weren’t looking: independence, an emotional vocabulary, a slightly softer way of seeing other people.
You did not choose the path, but you can choose what you keep from it. It’s a hard gift, but it’s still a gift.
7. Healing Isn’t Linear, It’s Circular
Just when I think I’m fine, something small pulls me back. A scent in a hallway. A laugh that sounds like hers. A song she used to hum in the grocery store.
When it comes back around, name it. Sit for a minute, feel your feet on the floor, and do something you know will soothe you. Return to one steady ritual, even if it is small. You don’t have to win the day; just come back to yourself and try again tomorrow.
The answer doesn’t really change. It hurts, then it loosens. Expect it to come back and meet it without shame. Healing moves in circles, not lines. Each pass gives you a little more air.
8. Moving On Does Not Mean Letting Go
Moving forward is not a betrayal. It is how love keeps breathing. I can hold my mom in one hand and still reach with the other.
In remembering, I learned to open my heart again. Letting my stepmom in was never about replacing my mother. It was about choosing more love and realizing my heart could hold it. She just kept showing up — the porch light on, the extra seat saved, the text that said “home?” when the day felt too heavy. She was patient when I wasn’t ready, steady when grief was loud, gentle in the places that still ached.
She taught me that motherhood is presence and follow-through more than biology. It is rides and reminders, soup left on the stove, a hand that steadies a rattled morning. It is remembering the hard dates without making me say them out loud. It is listening long enough to hear what I couldn’t name.
Opening my heart to her did not erase my mom. It made room for both of them, the love that raised me and the love that helps me keep going. That is what moving on looks like. You carry what was, you honor what is, and you let a good person become family by the way she stays.
If moving on scares you, start small. Keep one familiar practice, welcome one new kindness, and let a good person stand beside what you lost. You can carry the past and still build a future, because love does not leave. It takes a new shape.
9. Some People Will Not Understand, And That Is Normal
People mean well, but not everyone knows how to listen. You will hear advice that lands wrong and clichés that leave you taken aback. The real work is finding the listeners who hear you the way you need to be heard.
Build a small, trustworthy circle. Share with people who can sit beside your pain without trying to fix it. Most will not understand, and part of you doesn’t want them to. You would never wish this hurt on anyone.
10. Love Is the Lesson
If grief is the cost of deep love, then I know I loved well.
Love doesn’t leave, it just changes form. I see her in everything I am becoming. In the way I love too hard, the way I show up for people, the way I notice small things, like light through kitchen windows or the smell of cinnamon in the fall.
I am the proof that she was here and that she mattered.
Carrying Her Forward
Grief isn’t absence. It’s a transformation. It’s finding her in the parts of myself that still shine.
Her loyalty, her humor, her warmth, all of it lives in me. I will never stop missing her, and I have learned to live with the missing.
On the drive to school, my brother and I would play a game with our mom: “What’s your favorite color today?” She never chose the same one twice. There were too many to pick just one, she said, so she chose based on her mood. Some days it was the blue of my brother’s eyes. Some days it was the red of the bow in my hair.
On the quiet days now, I picture her choosing yellow, the color of light and warmth, the color she left behind.
A Soft Landing
How lucky am I to love someone so much that even a decade later, she still colors every day of my life?
As long as there is grief, I will endure it, because it means she was here and it mattered.
If you’re in it right now, start small. Drink some water. Open a window. Text the friend who will always reply. Write down one good memory before you talk yourself out of it. You don’t have to fix everything today. You just have to stay and take the next small step forward.