Cancer took her. That's the sentence, and I've said it a hundred different ways trying to make it hurt less, and none of them work. Cancer took her. The same year she finally showed up — the same year of lunches and back roads and a hand over mine on the table — was the year her body started quietly quitting on her. She knew, I think, even before she told me. Maybe that's why she changed. Maybe a woman who knows she's running out of time stops wasting it behind closed doors. I only know that the year she gave me was the best one, and then it ended, and the ending didn't ask my permission.
After she was gone, the world expected me to grieve in a way it could recognize. People brought food. People said the right sentences. People told me she was in a better place, and I nodded, because what do you say to that? I stood where I was supposed to stand. I wore what you're supposed to wear. I thanked people for coming. I did all of it with the smile on, because the smile was the only thing I knew how to do anymore, and by then it fit so well nobody could tell it wasn't real.
But grief doesn't live where other people can see it. Grief lives in the car, in the grocery aisle, in the middle of the night when the house is quiet and there's no one left to be strong for. I would hear a song she'd liked and have to pull over, because my hands would be shaking too hard to drive. I would reach for my phone to call her about something small and stupid — a sale, a story, a sky that looked like one of our back-road afternoons — and then remember, all over again, that there was no one on the other end of that call anymore. Every time it was new. Every time it was the first time.
The worst part wasn't even the missing. The worst part was the unfinishedness of it. We had only just found each other. One year. One good, real year, after a childhood of closed doors. And then cancer took her, and I was left holding a bond that had barely learned to walk, with nowhere to put it. I wanted to tell her everything — the rest of it, the parts I'd saved for later, the parts about Damon that I'd kept back even in the last year. I wanted one more girls' day. I wanted to ask her the questions I'd been too careful to ask while she was here. But the dead don't answer questions. They just leave you with the ones you didn't ask in time.
And because I had been living with her when she passed, there was the packing. Nobody warns you about the packing. After the people leave and the food stops coming, you're left alone in the house you just nursed someone through dying in, and you have to pack up the majority of her things. Her clothes, still holding the shape of her. Her shoes by the door. The plates from the kitchen table where she finally, finally stayed. Box after box, deciding what to keep and what to give away, like you're being asked to choose which pieces of your mother get to survive and which ones don't. Every box I sealed felt like losing her again, smaller this time, quieter, but just as final. I would sit on the floor surrounded by her life in cardboard and cry the way I hadn't let myself cry at the service — not the smile, not the fine, just the girl who had moved back in to take care of her mother and was now packing her mother away.
When it was done, the house was quiet again. Not the quiet of my childhood, not the closed-door quiet. Worse. An empty quiet, the kind that comes after someone was just there, laughing at your table, holding your hand, and now the rooms are all yours again and you don't want them.
So the bottle got heavier. That's the truth nobody tells you about grief: it doesn't crack the bottle open. It seals it tighter. Because now the one person I might have told — the one person who had finally, finally stayed — was gone, and telling anyone else felt like handing a stranger something sacred. Caleb had already taught me that telling changed nothing. Now grief taught me the rest of the lesson: that some things, once you lose the person you wanted to say them to, you just carry forever.
I carried it. I smiled. I was fine. I was so fine that nobody ever asked twice.
And underneath the smile, the girl who had finally gotten her mother back was screaming for her all over again — only this time, there was no last year coming to save her.