The Language She Couldn't Teach Me

A year ago, my mother passed away. I keep writing that sentence to see if it has gotten any easier to hold. It has not, and I am starting to think that was never the assignment.

I spent a good part of this year quietly waiting for the one-year mark to mean something. Everyone treats it like a door you walk through. Like you put in your twelve months and grief hands you back a lighter version of yourself on the other side. Let me be honest. That is not how it went for me.

Here is what the year actually taught me.

It did not get smaller. I got bigger around it. The missing her did not shrink to fit my life. My life slowly, and not on any schedule I chose, grew wide enough to carry it. Those are not the same thing, and I wish someone had told me the difference sooner.

It also taught me that grief does not care what you have already survived. I have lost before. I thought that meant I knew the terrain. But every loss is its own country, with its own language, and you learn it from scratch whether you want to or not. There is something almost unfair in that one, because my mother was the one who taught languages. For years. She loved to travel, never met a place she did not want to understand. And here I am, a year in, learning the one language she could not teach me.

My mother was a private person. I am not going to perform her here, because that was never who she was. What I will say is that she was amazing, and that I miss her every single day, in the ordinary middle of things, which is where it lands hardest.

There were a lot of big moments this year. I gave a TEDx talk. I gave a commencement speech and received an honorary doctorate. We finished the house. And every time, there was this half-second where I reached for the phone to call and tell her first, before anyone else, and she was not there to pick up. She never saw the house finished, not in person. I keep collecting these, the moments she would have been in, and setting a place for her that stays empty.

The dragonflies still come. When we named this farm for her, I asked for a sign, and they appeared in an unmistakable way, as they always do when I ask. I did not know then how many times I would be asking. A year later they are still here, low over the grass in the evening, and I still take every one of them.

I used to think the point of a year like this was to get to the other side of it. A year in, I do not believe there is another side. There is just this: carrying her into every season this place has left to give me. The dragonflies still come. I still take them.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie