I admit that’s a grabby headline, but I come by it honestly. My mom died five years ago and it feels like bullshit. But it has been five years, so I’ve had time to get my head around more of the things I lost when she died.

My mother received her first supposedly terminal diagnosis when I was in my early 20s, and we spent eight years bracing for the end. The diagnoses changed over time, I wondered about that old hat of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and we tweaked our short-term outlooks even as we lugged around the weight of the long-term idea: some combination of junk, having to do with her lungs and her heart, was going to kill her. That’s where all of this was headed.

We threw family gatherings and went on vacation together. We carried supplemental oxygen tanks and the tubes and we took pictures sometimes. There was no reason not to, if we could, all things considered.

At her celebration of life, a well-meaning person put her hand on the back of my shoulder and told me how sad it was to lose my mother so young.

“How old are you?” She wanted to know.

“I’m 30,” I said.

She nodded and drew her lips tight. That clinched it. To lose one’s mother at 30 was sad.

But it didn’t land. Like too many things that get said at these events, it seemed to have more to do with the person who said it than with me. It was another person’s appraisal of the situation, not my situation.

My mother was “supposed to” die years ago, I thought. She “only had a few years” for the better part of a decade.

Did this woman realize all the things my mom was supposed to miss? My engagement, my wedding, visiting me in the first house I ever bought—that Craftsman bungalow we couldn’t keep watertight. None of it was guaranteed. We weren’t supposed to count on her being there for any of it. My pregnancy, the birth of my child—that milestone was the last time my mother made it back to our home state of Nebraska. She perched on a brown sectional in the bungalow and held my baby for hours. After that trip, she was Florida-bound in their snowbird home, closer to the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville. She breathed easier in that low, salt air.

But she made it. She met my baby the day she was born.

For god’s sake, we were at Disney World together—Disney World—just a few weeks before she died.

None of it was supposed to be possible. And every time could’ve been the last. (Isn’t that always true? But we lived those years like it was truer somehow.)

And now it’s been five years. She missed the pandemic, and I’m glad for that but also feel a little gross for saying so. For all the nightmares she endured, thank god she didn’t have to carry her waking body through that one.

My depression got worse before it got better, after she was gone. We didn’t have to figure that one out together. But maybe it would’ve been a privilege to see what we could make of it. What would I have said? What would she have done? I don’t know. It’s a coin toss. The not knowing is one of the losses I’m only now feeling, and grieving.

She got to meet my baby, but my baby was only two when my mom died, and that coinflip feels like a bunch of bullshit too.

I wonder what she and my kid would’ve been like together. My kid’s a gymnast and a monkey and she knows the difference between rude and mean. She’s amazing. What would it have been like between my daughter and my mother, now?

What would it have been like between me and my mother, now? We didn’t have a relationship, as adults, in any terrain but illness. I came into adulthood in that landscape. I can’t change any of it. It just was.

I’m sober now. I walked through that door two-and-a-half years ago, so no, with every day, I’m spending more of my life sober without her than I spent drinking without her. That’s a trip. It’s just enough time to really wonder how we would’ve gotten along if she’d known me sober.

Would I have gotten sober?

I’m more of myself sober, so “how it would’ve been” might be a question of intensity. More of me might have pushed more buttons and bounds with her, but I have to believe in the voice that I heard when I decided to stop drinking: there was nothing left for me down there. The maneuvers it would have taken to continue drinking would’ve been like, well, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

If I’m more of me sober, did my mother know me?

Could I have had both, my mother and sobriety?

I love her, and I’m glad I’m her daughter and it was hard to be her daughter sometimes. It’s two sides of the same coin and the whole thing together feels like bullshit.

And suddenly I can see myself as the person I might be in my 60s or 70s and I’m certain some of these pieces will feel smaller to her. Maybe there’s no tint of anger in the air where she’s sitting, or maybe there’s some different emotion on the flip side of the sadness. But I’m not her yet, and there are oceans between me and her.

Right now I’m sad and a little angry. My mom died five years ago, and I’m just trying to keep up.

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