I'm motherless, now what?

Making sense of things in real time, or at least trying.

Hello,

I’ve been a bit quiet here. My mom died 28 days ago — I started this draft on day 11, but it (and I) needed time. It feels weird not to mention this major life event before publishing the pieces I had already planned for this month. I don’t want to skip over it, of course. I’m still so in it that it feels impossible for me not to mention it here. I know she’d want me to carry on and do things that make me happy, which at the moment include creative writing (among other calm and relaxing things), so that’s what I’m doing.

I know I will eventually write something longer and more coherent about what I’ve just experienced, but for now, this is a great way to begin processing it. At some point, I’ll write about the 13 days that my brother and I waited patiently by her bedside, playing Gin Rummy, ordering takeout (pizza, Chinese, Thai, burgers, sushi), asking the hospice nurses question after question to make sure we understood everything and knew what to expect. Watching her breathe and then wondering over and over if she had just taken her last breath. Nope, just a case of apnea. Each night, when we left to get some rest, we thought it would be THE night. The night we’d get THE call notifying us of her passing. We even joked and made bets because, without a sense of humor, how do you keep on going? The call had to come eventually, but once she entered a morphine induced comatose state and stopped eating and drinking, we wondered how she was still going five days later, seven days later, 10 days later. One of the sweet hospice nurses gave her the nickname Amazing Amy.

Amazing Amy passed away on January 1st, 2026. My brother and I spent New Year’s Eve eating Asian takeaway at the round dining table in the kitchenette of our mom’s hospice house room, occasionally looking over at her across the room to see if she had taken her last breath. It was bizarre, but it was nice that we could experience it together. We left after dinner to get some rest, and roughly 90 minutes later, at 8:36 pm, my brother called me. It was THE call, so we hopped in our cars to meet at the hospice house, said our final goodbyes, and saw our mom off.