As we come up on 10 months since my mom passed away, that number feels impossible in two completely opposite ways. It feels like an eternity since I last heard her voice, and somehow, at the same time, it feels like it was just yesterday.

Time has been such a complicated part of my grief. In the beginning, I measured it in survival, just making it through another hour, another day, another week. Even now, I still find myself quietly marking time, as if each passing day is some kind of milestone I should feel proud of surviving.

But the truth is, grief doesn’t care about timelines.

I think about my mom every single day. Honestly, every second of every day in some way. I think about her when I’m driving. I think about her every time I’m in New Jersey, her home state, where everything somehow feels tied to her. I think about her whenever I experience something I know she would have loved.

And in those moments, I can still hear her.

“How cool,” she’d say, followed by that little chuckle of hers. It didn’t matter what I was telling her. That was always her response. Her way of saying she was proud, excited for me, right there with me.

There are still days when grief swallows me whole.

The difference now is that I’ve learned how to carry those emotions a little better. I know they will come, and I know they will eventually pass. But if I’m being honest, there are still moments when I almost want grief to consume me, because somehow, in the heaviness of it, I feel closest to her. I feel the depth of my humanity in missing her.

My mom was the center of all of our worlds, though I’m not sure she ever fully realized that. She spent so much of her life in survival mode, constantly pushing forward, that I don’t know if she ever stopped long enough to see just how deeply loved and essential she was.

And as painful as this truth is, I also know something else:

If my mom hadn’t died, the life I’m living right now probably wouldn’t exist.

That realization comes with so much guilt, but it’s honest.

Because before losing her, I was moving through life half-awake. Existing, not living. Picking my way through each day, stressed, disconnected, and slowly self-destructing in ways I didn’t even fully recognize.

Losing her broke me open.

And somehow, in that devastation, I found my life again.

That doesn’t make the loss worth it. I would trade every lesson, every moment of growth, every version of this new life to have her back.

But since I can’t, I choose to believe that maybe her final gift to me was this—my life back