Perhaps it is fitting, too, that while my grief has lessened, my sense of being motherless has intensified. I hadn’t anticipated this. The first grips of grief were so terrible that I couldn’t wait to get beyond them, to a state I hoped might be “better.” But as each new day arrives I find myself, though suffering less acutely, feeling more unmothered. Strange. I have a piercing sense of empathy for friends who lost a parent when they were young. Even at my age, I still have so many questions, about children, about cooking, about what my mother thought of her life’s work.
