When I lost my darling Mum suddenly

a phone call, a gasp, my world unravelled in seconds

nothing prepared me for the way grief has

rewritten me, line by line, changing everything

I once knew, reshaping the contours of

my heart and soul, unspooling the person

I once was, forcing me to become someone new

Grief is an insistent editor, it crosses out

whole chapters of my identity, and scribbles

new ones in margins I did not know existed

it taught me to find her in subtler ink, in the

stubborn aspiration I cling to (her legacy)

I speak her language now, fluently and unwillingly

a dialect of longing and unexpected charm

Most of all, grief has changed me in ways

I am still discovering, as I am learning to carry her

in my refusal to take a single sunrise for granted

in the way I mother myself without her

I did not choose this transformation, yet here I am

reconstructed by loss, remoulded by absence

and forever altered by the love that still lingers

I am not the same person I was before I lost her

and I never will be, grief has rebuilt me

brick by jagged brick, somehow, even in the

midst of grief, I carry her love in every rewritten

line of myself, and in that, I find a new kind of

wholeness, that gives me strength to keep going

and maybe that is what love does, it changes me