3 Years On: The Unspoken Tyranny of Moving On

Mum, I will not move on, but I will move forward into a future

you cannot walk beside me in physically

but one where your spirit is stitched into every step I take 

Ma, today marks 3 years since you slipped from this world suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving us stunned, broken, and breathless, 3 years, a thousand days, tears, and changes, a blink of an eye in the grand, aching scheme of missing you, and while the raw, screaming pain, has softened into a dull, ever-present hurt, a new damn enemy has emerged, the invisible, suffocating, unspoken expectations of a world, that now seem to orbit my grief, as there is a constant, infuriating pressure, a societal hum, a low frequency buzz, that says one thing, over and over, “it is time to move on”, but I keep asking myself, move on to what, exactly? Move on to where, precisely? To me, the very phrase is violence  

Ma, on this razor-sharp anniversary, a day that hangs heavy with a silence the damn world refuses to acknowledge, it makes those provocations sting even more, and I am filled with a fresh, boiling loathing, not for the loss itself, though that resentment has its own seasons, but for the soft sighs, implicit whispers, sideways glances, changed subjects, or sometimes even the blunt words “move on”, I loathe it, I truly, deeply loathe this pressure placed upon me, as it strips love of its depth and grief of its truth, it suggests adjustment, acceptance, a settling of dust, as if your memory should be handled like clutter, sorted, boxed, discarded, frankly speaking, I find that the very suggestion is damn insulting  

Ma, in these 3 years, I have learned that what cuts deepest is not only your awful absence, but the demand of getting over, the world seems has its own timeline for grief, people start to look at me differently after only a few months, as I can feel the weight of their discomfort and their restlessness, in their carefully averted eyes, when I speak your name, as if I have committed a social faux pas by remembering you out loud, or in their subtle shift in topic to something more positive, less uncomfortable, since my persistent grief, is an inconvenient reminder of pain and loss, my sorrow is a vacuum they feel compelled to fill with platitudes, because sitting with me in the messy, ugly truth of it, is too hard

Ma, the phrase of move on, is a sterile, cruel little box, people try to pack you into, and this phrase, perhaps one of the most casually brutal in the English language, implies a forward momentum to a better place, a destination, and it reduces the complex, lifelong process of integrating loss into a linear race with checkpoints: crying allowed for X weeks, functioning expected by X months, back to normal required by X years, this pressure is, I believe, less about my well-being and more about the comfort of others, it is society’s annoyance to the unvarnished reality of enduring loss, but I will not bow to a culture, that insists on my grief tidied up, contained, and eventually, archived in a forgotten past

Ma, this third year has not been easier than those first two years, people talk about moving on, but how do I move, when half my soul is buried? When every milestone, every ordinary Tuesday is haunted by your absence? How do I move on from you, who gave me life, who shaped my being, who loved me in ways so deep, unrepeatable? Move on to a future, that remains stubbornly, offensively, permanently devoid of you? Move on to a merciless reality where your laugh is a ghost sound in my memory? Move on to a life, where the foundation of my existence is relegated to a photograph on a shelf, a story told in the past tense? But for me, there is no moving on, because you are my darling Mum

Ma, the damn truth is, my grief tells the story of how dearly we loved each other, to expect me to stop mourning is to ask me to silence that love, to tacitly agree that the magnitude of your absence is something I can simply outgrow, to deny the enormity of what you mean to me, and I cannot, I will not, but what a profound and tragic misunderstanding of love, since my love for you is not an old book, which was beautiful, meaningful in its time, but can now be tucked away, its contents remembered fondly, but no longer actively read, nevertheless, there is no clean ending to this love, no finish line on missing you, and no path forward that does not carry your absence like a shadow behind my every step 

Ma, 3 years on, I miss you no less. I love you no less, as living authentically with your loss, carrying your love and my sorrow as dual passengers, it is messy, it is hard, but it is real, it is true, it is the ultimate proof of a love that was, and is, too vast to ever be set aside, so on your 3 year anniversary, I am refusing to perform for an audience, refusing to pack my love away in a box labelled “the past”, refusing to feel guilty for the sadness that still, will always find me, I will grant myself the permission to loathe the platitudes, and I will be, for the rest of my life, a daughter who loves you fiercely, despite the unkind distance that your loss has imposed, it is what my heart knows, that is exactly as it should be