First, thanks to all of you who left such kind comments on my last crazy poem. I guess grief is universal.
This Saturday marks two years since my mom died. Last Lent, at the one-year mark, I was still grieving hard. The year before, I was in shock because she died just two weeks into Lent. The Lents before that fall into The Cancer Years.
If you want to know more about Merry Nell Drummond, and if you have a thing for cancer poems, there are 72 of them here on the right-hand side of this blog marked “My Mother’s Diary.” They aren’t all good, but they were all helpful to write.
For those of you walking through grief, I want to say that it does get better, although it never goes away. My friend, Becca, who lost her mother right before I lost mine said, “For the whole first year, I felt like she had just died.”
Now, it feels like it happened a long time ago. When I wrote the marriage post, it was the first time I had written about my mom without feeling the need to end it with “and then, she died.”
Despite the zombie dream, it’s like she’s no longer dead. She’s now eternal.