To My Mum, With All the Years We Never Had
There are some losses that never really leave us. They simply become part of who we are, woven into the fabric of our lives, carried quietly until something touches that place inside us and suddenly we feel it all over again.
For me, that place is you, Mum.
I was only three when Dad was killed on his way home from work. He was a truck driver, and somehow, in the ordinary course of a day, our whole world changed. You lost the love of your life, and we lost our dad. We were so young, and none of us could have understood the enormity of what we had lost or the years of sadness that would follow.
I think about you sometimes, Mum, and the weight you must have carried. Dad was your person, the love of your life, and you never really wanted to be without him. I know you suffered deeply. I wish I could have known you as a woman rather than only through the eyes of a child. I wish I could have sat with you as an adult and asked you about your life, your love, your dreams, and all the things that perhaps you never got to say.
Ten years and a couple of weeks after we lost Dad, we lost you, too. Leukaemia took you from us, and I was twelve.
Twelve.
Sometimes I still struggle to comprehend just how young that was. At twelve, I should have had so much more of you ahead of me. I should have had the teenage years, the arguments and the laughter, the growing up, the milestones, the ordinary days that we never think will one day become the things we would give anything to have back.
I should have had the chance to grow into a woman with my mum still beside me.
And I didn't.
When I think of you, I don't think of a perfect woman. I think of my mum. Funny, fiery, fierce, with a mouth on her and never one to back down. You had a temper. You were strict. You could be difficult. But you were also loving, and you had a spirit that could not easily be contained.
You were a whole woman, with all the contradictions and complexities that make us human. You had known a love so deep that losing it changed the course of your life. You carried sadness, and I wonder how much of that sadness the little girl I was could really understand.
I look at photographs of you now and search for the pieces of myself that might have come from you. We don't look much alike, but there is one photograph where I see myself in you as a child. For a moment, it feels as though we meet somewhere across the years, your little girl and mine, even though I never got the chance to know you in the way I wish I could have.
After you died, life didn't stop to let us grieve. We had to find our way forward. My sister and I were still children, and the family we had left was trying to navigate its own pain. There were decisions about where we would live and what would happen next. My sister begged for me to stay. I think about that now and feel such sadness for her, too. She had lost her parents, and she was trying not to lose her sister.
There were so many things we were too young to have to carry.
And perhaps this is part of what I am grieving now, all these years later. Not only the loss of you, but the childhood that changed when you left. The years I spent finding my way, trying to work out where I belonged, becoming a woman before I had really had the chance to finish being a child.
I married at eighteen. Life kept moving, as life does. I built a life, loved, lost, learned, fell apart in places, and found my way back to myself in others. I became a woman you never got to meet.
And that is one of the hardest things about losing your mum so young. You never get to know each other as adults. You never get to discover what your relationship might become when the years soften you both, when you can sit across a table with a cup of tea and talk not just as mother and daughter, but as two women who have lived, loved, suffered and survived.
I will never know what that would have been like with you.
I will never know what advice you might have given me, what you might have thought of the woman I became, or whether we would have argued about the same things we argued about when I was little. I will never know how you would have laughed at my stories, what you would have said about the choices I've made, or how it might have felt to have you beside me through all the chapters of my life.
There are so many years we never had.
And I think that is why this time of year hurts so much. Because grief is not only about the person who is gone. Sometimes it is about everything that should have happened but didn't. The conversations, the ordinary moments, the shared history that other people get to keep building long after childhood is over.
I watch Will with his mum, and sometimes the longing is almost too much to bear. I see the years they have shared, the familiarity, the bond that continues as he grows older. I see something I have never really known for myself, and I feel the ache of what I missed.
I don't begrudge him that love. Quite the opposite. I know how precious it is.
But it reminds me that I never got to grow up with you.
I never got to know what it felt like to have my mum through all the seasons of becoming myself. I never got to call you as a grown woman and tell you about my day, or ask you what you thought, or hear your voice simply because I needed to hear it.
I miss you, Mum. And I miss the years we never got.
Perhaps both of those things will always live together inside me.
As I grow older, I understand more about how complicated life is. I understand that people can be fiercely loving and deeply wounded at the same time. That grief can change a person. That sometimes people are doing the best they can while carrying pain that is bigger than they know how to manage.
I can have compassion for what you endured and still grieve what I needed. I can love you without pretending everything was easy. I can remember your temper and your tenderness, your fire and your sadness, and hold all of it as part of the woman who was my mother.
I don't need you to have been perfect. I just wish I had had more time.
More time for you to heal. More time for us to grow. More time for me to discover you beyond the memories of a little girl. More time for you to see who I became.
And perhaps there is a part of me that will always be twelve, still missing you, still wishing things had been different, still wondering what life might have looked like if you had stayed.
I have spent so much of my life learning how to find my way back to myself. I have written about pain, healing, courage and the things we must face if we are to live honestly. I have learned that we can carry our wounds without allowing them to define every part of us. That we can create something beautiful without pretending the painful things never happened.
But none of that makes me miss you less.
Sometimes I don't want a lesson. I don't want to find meaning in the loss or turn it into something that makes me stronger. Sometimes I just want my mum.
I want the years. I want the conversations. I want the chance to know you now, and for you to know me.
I want the things that cannot be given back.
And so, as your anniversary approaches, I am letting myself feel the sadness. I am letting myself acknowledge the little girl who lost so much, the woman who kept going, and the daughter who still longs for her mum.
I hope, wherever love goes when a life ends, that some part of you knows me now.
I hope you know that I have lived. That I have loved deeply. That I have tried to make something meaningful from this life, even when it has hurt. That I am still learning, still growing, still finding my way.
And I hope you know that I remember you not only for the way you died, or for the sadness you carried, but for the woman you were.
My funny, fiery, fierce mum.
The woman who loved Dad so deeply.
The woman who was loving and complicated and human.
The woman I lost far too soon.
I wish I could have had you for longer. I wish we had been given the years that belonged to us. I wish you could have known the woman I am today, and I could have known you as the woman you might have become.
But we had the time we had, and I carry you with me in the space that remains.
I cannot go back and give that little girl her mum for longer. I cannot change what happened or recover the years we lost.
But I can love you still.
I can remember you honestly.
I can miss you without apology.
And I can keep living, carrying both the love you left behind and the sadness of all we never got to be.
I love you, Mum.
I always have.
And after all these years, I still wish we had more time.
Your daughter, always.