I am still a person like you, with a life like yours, yet not. I am still a mother like you, yet not at all like you, all at the same time. I wish there was some way you could understand me, without becoming who I am now.

You see, there’s a pain I carry, unlike any pain you carry, unless you are a bereaved mother too. This pain I carry is always there. It doesn’t nap during the day, or get safely tucked into bed at night. It follows me everywhere, it never leaves my side– like my daughter used to do, only grief is not cuddly, nor sweet.

No, a mother’s grief is a torturous life sentence, that no one wants to live. It’s bargaining for a different ending, over and over again, one where no one dies. It’s the panic of it happening again, any time, anywhere… It’s the toxic self-blame that never turns its finger around to blame itself. It’s the spiraling of obsessive thoughts, (what if… if only?) seeping its poison through every crevice of my mind. It’s the regret, so convincing that I failed as a mother, powerless to protect my child from death. Yes, grief’s emotions are as unpredictable as the ocean tide, crashing down on me to drown me alive.

While you complain about your kids spilling milk or painting on the wall, I swallow my grief whole, silently choking on my wish for my problems to be just. Like. Yours. Paint splattered all over my walls, milk spilled, covering my kitchen floor. I am aching for the signs of my daughter living, breathing, playing, alive in my home. I am longing for the iterations of what could have been.

Instead, I have an empty chair at every meal, the contents of my daughter’s entire life neatly stacked in sharpie-marked boxes in storage that now smells more like mildew and dust than of my daughter.

There is an eternal hole in my heart, in my life, the size and shape of her and only her, that no one and nothing will ever be able to fill.