“Oh shit, it’s 2024 isn’t it?”

Gina, glancing up from her laptop, gave me a confused look. “Uh, yeah? Has been all year. Why?”

“In about a month, my mother will have been dead for thirty years.”

We looked at each other in shock.

She never knew my mother. Most people in my life today never knew my mother, outside of family like Aunt Sheila and a short-list of cousins. She died on September 15th, 1994, from metastasized colon cancer. I think technically her liver failed, and she went septic—she was certainly orange enough last time I saw her.

As usual, Mother did not want an audience to her failures. Poppa and I had fought hard to get her off life support that morning, and by the time the doctors acknowledged her living will and DNR orders (which were on file, for fuck’s sake), we were both far past our ability to be functional. Everyone assured us that it might take days or even weeks for mother to finally shuffle off this mortal coil, so I drove us home (something I do not remember, at all) and we both went to take a nap.

I think Poppa took the phone off the hook (this was the end of the era of landline phones, and ours was a very stereotypical kitchen phone), so that by the time I got up and realized what he had done, the hospital had been trying to reach us for a while.

Mother had died less than an hour after we left.

My life since then has been filled with people who never met her, who only know of the legend by the stories I tell, the photos I post of her (of us) sometimes.

At first, I did not tell many. The pain was too raw, and the relief that her slow-roll into oblivion was finally over too strong.

It’s almost thirty years later and only now do I feel like I have a grasp on who she was and what her death—and her life—meant to me.

When grief is fresh, we all want assurances that the pain will not last forever. We cling to “this too shall pass” and “time heals all wounds” even as we wallow in our pain. It’s natural to both crave a release from the clutches of grief, while also fearing that to stop grieving would mean we also stop remembering. Many people spend years in that cycle, scared to let go of the pain of grief because they believe it means letting go of the one last strand of emotion that connects us to our lost loved one.

Yet, at some point, many of us lift our heads and ask those who have gone before us down this painful path: can it get better? Will it hurt less eventually?

Those of use who have been through that extended wringer try to soften the blow, but the truth is more complicated than that. Yes, the pain remains, also, our lives simply get bigger around it.

Deep down in the crevices of memory, I’m still the terrified girl hopelessly watching her life fall apart like a slow-motion landslide. Now, though, I am walking over the remains of that landslide, which have taken years to settle. The landscape blooms with vibrant life and a myriad of experiences I have lived on top of the catastrophe.

But beneath my feet are the graves. My mother’s, my father’s, and mine: the life I used to have, the life I thought I would lead, the life I tried to preserve after their deaths and the loss of my home.

It’s all still there, the pain and the loss and the grief, along with love and good memories and terrible photographs. Someday I’ll lay down and join that dirt, but for now, walking over the scar of that landslide, it’s a damn good vantage point.