39 Months On: The Loneliest Journey

Without My Darling Mum

Mum, your absence has turned into a kind of wilderness

that only I can navigate, no one else can walk this exact path

the one that winds through memories only you and I shared

Ma, it has been 39 months since you slept in your sweet dreams, a calculation I do without thinking, a unit of time that feels both preposterously long, and yet, in the grand scheme of a life, devastatingly short, as it is simply impossible to measure time in months, when your absence is now measured in every breath, every morning, every quiet night, although grief has no real calendar, somehow, I do, because my soul remembers the before, and after as two different lifetimes, 3 years and 3 months, a thousand days and more, each one a silent testament to a loss that has permanently, irrevocably reshaped the very atmosphere of my life, nevertheless, there has been a kind of solitude no one can step into with me, and that is where the loneliness lives 

Ma, 39 months have passed, and this continues to be, undoubtedly, the loneliest journey, I have ever walked on this earth, in the immediate aftermath of your sudden loss, there was a chaotic, almost public, form of grief, as there were flowers, cards, and a steady stream of voices, all sharing the same stunned sorrow, as the wound was fresh, everyone can see it, they grieved for you, and some grieved with me, and in that collective mourning, there was a fragile, temporary raft upon which I could float, but that boat very quickly drifted to shore, the crowd dispersed, returning to their own intact worlds, I was left alone to walk a path, no one else can see, through a wilderness that is mine, and mine alone, this, I realised, is the loneliest part of the journey

Ma, the core of this loneliness, is not just about the excruciating aching, visceral missing of you, your voice, your touch, your love, though I do, desperately, with a ferocity that can still steal my breath, but it is also about feeling fundamentally severed from a shared reality, 39 months ago, when you unexpectedly left this universe, not just your physical presence that disappeared but an entire world collapsed with you, a world we built together, we inhabited together, we understood together, a world no one else ever fully shared or will ever be able to enter, the path we walked together, are now overgrown with the weeds of your absence, the landmarks we assembled together, traditions, routines, ways of being, are now entirely ruins, that I visit on my own 

Ma, this loneliness is the quiet acknowledgment of an irreplaceable connection, the solitary burden of carrying a love that has lost its physical recipient, and the work of learning to talk to you in a new language, one of memory, of spirit, of signs felt on the wind, but here is the isolating truth I have come to know, with a clarity that is both brutal and sacred, in the very marrow of my bones, that no one, absolutely not a single soul on this earth, grieves exactly this loss, the loss of you in the way I do, and the loss of a mother from a daughter’s life is a unique alchemy, a formula written in a dialect only the two of us spoke, as you are the only one of two people, who knew my beginnings, my endings, my flaws, and my fears, without needing any interpretations

Ma, this is a loneliness that does not depend on being physically alone, a loneliness that is impenetrable, even in a room full of people, an isolation that is most acute in a crowd, and it is the ache of looking around and realising that everyone else still belongs to a world that I no longer fully reside, there is a depth to this ache, that cannot be translated, while others can stand at the edge and look in, they can toss down memories like flowers, and they can walk beside me for stretches, but no one else lived our story, because, they cannot feel the chasm you left in my identity, it is the exact shape of the Mum-sized hole inside me, and its edges are so precise, so perfectly contoured, that only you once filled it, nothing, or no one can resembles or replace it 

Ma, your awful loss that is mine alone, shaped by the powerful bond between you and me, and this grief journey also is mine to walk alone, because there is no choice but to walk on, but each step feels like travelling further from the last place I saw you, even as I have been carrying you with me everyday for the past 39 months, so, I learn to make this loneliness a companion of it, not to conquer it, or fix it, or even to befriend it, but to acknowledge that, it is the natural consequence of a love, that was so central, so defining, that the depth of this chasm is simply a testament to the magnitude of what was built there, and I am learning to build bridges across it, bridges made of legacy, of the love I now must direct outward, as I can no longer give it to you

Ma, grief has stretched itself across these past 39 months, like an endless horizon, shifting in intensity but never disappearing, and it is those little things that highlight the wilderness I now walk, the piece of family gossip, that is now mine alone to remember, the private jokes that vanish on my lips because there is no one left who would get it, and I became the sole curator of a museum for two, the only living speaker of a dialect now forgotten, yet, I would still choose our shared bond, again and again, even knowing the loneliness it left behind, I will carry this singular sorrow, the specific and lonely grief of a daughter for you my mother, a secret landscape, I will navigate alone for the rest of my days, holding tight to the map of a world, that only we knew