There are mornings when the light enters the room
as if it has been carrying her name all night,
soft at the edges, unsure whether to knock
or simply spill itself across the floor
the way she once moved through a house:
quiet, necessary, unannounced.
Grief has thinned over the years,
but it has not vanished.
It sits like a shawl left on the back of a chair,
gathering the scent of seasons,
waiting for a shoulder that will never return.
Nothing replaces a mother.
Not the photographs,
not the stories retold until they shine smooth as river stones,
not even the sudden moments when her voice
seems to rise from your own throat
and you pause, startled by the inheritance of breath.
Her memory is a room you keep sweeping,
though no one walks through it anymore.
Dust motes drift like unasked questions.
Would she have laughed at this?
Would she have approved of the person you became?
Would she have held her grandchildren
with that same fierce, unguarded tenderness
you still feel in the bones of your childhood?
Time has carried her forward without her,
and carried you forward without her,
yet some part of you remains at the threshold
of that final day—
a child again,
trying to understand how the world can continue
when one of its pillars has quietly withdrawn.
Still, she is here in the way you stand,
in the way you worry,
in the way you love with a seriousness
that feels older than your years.
She is here in the decisions you make
without knowing why,
in the instinct to protect,
in the sudden warmth that rises
when someone speaks her name.
Twenty‑nine years is a long time
to miss someone every day,
yet the missing has become its own kind of presence:
a lantern you carry,
lighting the path she never got to see,
revealing, step by step,
that you have become the proof
that her life mattered.
And though she never met the ones
who now carry her story in their blood,
somewhere in the quiet places of the world
her absence leans toward them,
like a tree bending toward light,
still offering shelter
in ways she never had the chance to know.