It completely slipped my mind Saturday, when I was so busy with my list of things to do, that it was the fifth anniversary of the day Mom unexpectedly died.  I knew earlier in the week that Saturday was the anniversary, and I remembered again on Sunday while watching a special about the life of Walter Cronkite.  When they talked about his wife of 65 years I thought of Mom and Dad, married 52 years when she died.  If they had lived another 13 years they’d have been 88 and married 65 years.  I was doing the math when I realized that I had missed the anniversary.

I don’t think that not noticing the anniversary of Mom’s death, on the day itself, means I love her less, or mourn her loss less.  I choose to think that some healing has occurred, a bit of the overwhelming sting has lessened, gotten a bit more fuzzy around the edges.  Loosened it’s grip on me.  This is such an interesting experiment, this walk through grief, if it weren’t that I had to lose two of the most important people in the world.  It used to scare me when people whose parents had died many years ago told me they still missed their parents every day.  I was depressed to imagine living with such an intense pain every single day.  So it has been good to come to know that yes, you miss them every day, but it is a manageable pain, livable.

So today, as I’m baking bread I think of my Mom, and the last time she was in my kitchen.  I don’t have that loud wailing going on inside of me anymore.   It used to shriek “Moooooommmmmm!” constantly, interfering with thought and logic and every day tasks.  That’s subsided and in it’s place is just a warm, slightly sad, quiet place.  I can still conjure up the wailing, if I think about it too much and sometimes I do it just to prove to myself that I can, that she’s still right there so to speak.  But it’s not interfering so much, and the pain is a little softer, and I can say for sure now to other people who are just at the beginning of their loss that someday, in their own time, it will get better.

Another lesson I’ve learned from my mother.  It will get better.