Stepping Outside Grief’s Shadow
My mom was fifty-three when she passed away.
I’m forty-eight, and I’ve been working through this peculiar fear about being almost the same age my mom was when she passed.
I’m not looking for answers or asking why she passed. I’m just working through this latest chapter of life stuff out loud as I get closer to this looming (yet arbitrary) number.
My sister and I experienced something similar, first when her son turned sixteen, then my daughter turned sixteen two years later.
They both outlived our older brother, who died in a car crash when he was fifteen.
We talked about the relief we felt for this strange milestone. It felt miraculous that we could be parents of children that lived longer than our older sibling.
Fifty-three.
It seemed like a million years away from where I was when she passed away. I was twenty-seven. I still have a few years to go, but this dang recurring fear started nudging me around the forty-three years mark, so I had to stare it down and figure out how to make it not scary.
Or less scary.
Mind over matter, as they say. (Easier said than done, sometimes.)
So, here’s how I’ve been working through the stuff.
