Someone recently advised me that writing out my experience with the loss of my Mom may help me, and others. While I started this blog as a way to process and help, I wasn’t quite ready to share my most recent story. My parents loved my writing, and my Mom once mentioned how my stories could reach others. She also had a dream of being a published author. While I am not great symphonic creator of words, I do finally feel like finally putting into words will not only help me, but potentially someone else as well. Please have patience. The scars have not yet healed, and new ones are still being created. I don’t think some scars are meant to be healed honestly. They help define who we become. They make us stronger, although while examining their definition, we may feel weak.

When the Glue Dissolves – Part One

By the time I was 42, I had lost both of my parents. I knew, rationally, that losing your parents isn’t a unique tragedy. I knew people who had faced far worse at much younger ages. But grief doesn’t care about logic. At 42, it just felt entirely unfair. I felt too young to be an orphan.

My brothers were already in their fifties; they had been given the gift of more time, more years, more adult memories with Mom and Dad. It was only much later that a strange realization hit me: I was now almost the same age my Dad had been when he lost his own parents. For the first time, I truly understood the quiet, heavy sorrow he must have carried, even while he stayed so incredibly strong for us. Mom, like my brothers, had been granted a little more time with her parents. But Dad’s passing was a sudden, violent fracture. It was a devastating blow that permanently shifted our family dynamic—a dynamic that, though I didn’t know it yet, would completely crumple when Mom left us, too.

After Dad died, I watched Mom struggle to survive the loss of her soulmate. I forced myself to learn how to be the strong one around her, desperately masking the fact that I felt like I was free-falling into a dark, bottomless hole. Somehow, as a family, we adapted. We remembered Dad, we leaned on each other, and we kept living.

And then, our glue—our Mom—got sick.

In July of 2024, Mom set off for an Alaskan cruise, taking one of my brothers and my sister-in-law with her. It was one of her bucket list items and she was so excited. She had been bravely tackling her travel list the last few years—Switzerland, Ireland, multiple cruises. She was finally reclaiming her joy, choosing to truly live again. And she did.

But on the way back, reality crashed in. They all contracted COVID-19 on the trip. When she landed, she was so weak that I offered to pick her up and drive her home. When I saw her, it broke my heart; she was so incredibly sick I couldn’t even give her a hug. I felt so I bad for her that one of her dream trips had such a terrible ending. Yet, even in her weakness, she was thinking of us. She told me she had managed to buy souvenirs before she got sick, and that they were waiting for us in her suitcase. “We’ll wait until you’re feeling better to get them,” I promised. She told me how breathtakingly beautiful Alaska was, mentioning she had even brought a little sketchbook along to try and capture it. I am still so incredibly grateful she got to see it.

Because we couldn’t safely visit her yet, we started a daily routine of texting to check in. Then one day I didn’t hear from her.

It was just an ordinary morning, but when I realized I hadn’t heard from her, a cold, uneasy feeling settled deep in my stomach. I dropped off a work call early and dialed her house. I told myself that if she didn’t answer, I was getting in my car right that second. I just knew, in my very bones, that something was terribly wrong.

As it turned out, my brother, who lived right next door to her, was feeling the exact same phantom pull. He had already gone over to check on her. When I called, my sister-in-law answered the phone in a panic. She told me they had just found Mom unconscious on the floor, and the ambulance was on its way. It wasn’t the first time my intuition had warned me of disaster, and in that horrifying moment, I was so thankful I hadn’t ignored it.

Eyes blurred by tears and a body driven by panic, I quickly filled my husband in and had him drive me to the hospital. We actually beat the ambulance there.

When they finally allowed us in the back of the ER, the world blurred. Our local emergency room had been notoriously overrun lately, but thankfully, they gave her a room of her own. As I walked down the corridor, the other patients lining the hallway dissolved into a smear of tears and terror.

Mom was mostly unconscious, her eyes opening only when she was deeply agitated. Then, the doctor stepped into the room and delivered the verdict: they believed she had suffered a massive, severe stroke.

My mind went completely blank. No one in our family had ever had a stroke. We had no map for this territory. Then came the words that anchor themselves in your throat: the doctor explained that the stroke was so severe that it wouldn’t have mattered if she had arrived hours earlier. The damage was immediate. Total. Final.

I stood there in the low sterile light of the ER room, suffocated by the realization that I couldn’t fix this. I fixated on the grain of the leather seat, the dots in the floor, the beeping of the machines. I was entirely lost, drowning in questions about what this meant for her, for her quality of life, for our future. And for the first time in my life, Dad wasn’t there to help me carry it.