I could recall the sun piercing through the hot, humid air as the morning slowly crept into afternoon. Inside, the air was damp and smelled of construction. The house was newly built, a cookie-cutter home symbolic of fresh starts and new beginnings. Except this wasn’t a beginning. An occurrence such as this would only fall under the category of endings. But even on that sunny morning, there was no escaping the truth of it all; my mother had died.

 On the morning of her death, the scene resembled a house party: cars lined up on the curb, the front door wide open, inviting. The people were nice. They came bearing gifts and home cooked meals, as there seemed to be little else to offer. Many told me they were sorry, apologizing profusely as if they had played some pivotal role in what had now transpired. Acquaintances displayed their frowns and furrowed brows, their fixed gazes attempting to decipher my blank stare. It was as if they had thrown a party for her, but she never showed up.

As guests gathered, a friend’s mom offered to take me to the frozen yogurt store 10 minutes out. The drive through town was filled with the isolating feeling that the world hadn’t stopped–not once–to listen in on the most devastating moment of my life. By the time I entered the frozen yogurt store, however, all had remained the same. I observed the cashier, messy tables of small children, and laughing teenagers who licked away at their plastic spoons; these people were enjoying the day. It was strange, because in this setting I could almost pretend that I too was enjoying my day. At that moment, I could reverse back to a year before, a time when I could display my joy honestly. I indulged in that feeling for a bit, smiling for a photo and chatting with my siblings. It shouldn’t be possible to live a life after death, but here I was. 

I returned home, and the crowd still remained. They had crawled to the second floor, into my parent's bedroom, where they began to shift around quietly like respectful museum-goers. They peeked at her nightstand, cluttered with intricate frames containing photos from as far back as her childhood. The dresser, a usual spot for her medications, books, and other belongings, was cleared off for visitors. Her former body was relocated to the funeral home, so all that was left were the selected remnants of a life they claimed was well lived. “Well lived”—that was the one piece of this confusing puzzle I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. The reassurance after a person’s death that they lived a wonderful life, with no regrets–what did it mean? The mourners came and went, but they never departed without leaving you with some variation of that overused phrase.

A part of me couldn’t help but think that “well lived” was not the whole truth. Looking at the reality of the situation–the last three years she spent burdened with a selfish, hungry disease–it was even worse. How could you have looked at this life and determined that it was complete? I pondered these thoughts as I stared at old photos of my mother, desperate to find some pathway into the lives she occupied before I knew her. 

Here she was, a wide-eyed, red-haired toddler on a bicycle, then a teenage girl laughing on a beach with her sister, and then a young, bright woman smiling for a photo in a foreign country. Blazoned across each image was the blatantly devastating reminder that I would never meet these versions of my mother, at least not directly. I wanted desperately to know my mother in all stages of her life as richly as I knew her in my own lifetime, to be able to relate to the person she had been and not the synopsis of the person I was told she was. I had lived for a little more than a decade, but I knew enough of the world to know that she would soon be reduced to the palatable concepts of the dutiful wife and the selfless mother. 

In the back of my mind, I also knew that the once-fresh memories of my childhood would, in time, fog into cloudy renditions, including all of the years I spent by my mother’s side. Eventually, I lost more than I had budgeted for, as the comfort of my mom’s voice when she entered a room, the smell of her perfume when I lied next to her, and the knowledge she existed, somewhere, anywhere all faded swiftly in the night. These moments in time, no matter how tightly I gripped them, would never last. In short, I hadn’t prepared to let go of my mom this quickly. 

The days passed and the funeral lapsed in a blur. My first summer without her became a struggle of anger, confusion, grief, and control. I was scared of the person I would grow into without the guidance of my mother. Then fall came, and acknowledging that other people had moved on and left me in my own puddle of grief made me sick of the world. It was easy to blame my dissatisfaction on the greater issues—visiting the cemetery less often, selling the home she lived her last moments in. In reality, it was the trivial moments that made me irritable, like her stocking absent from the fireplace at Christmas or the sound of casual laughter on a weekday night. I couldn’t understand my own family, how they acted as if all were normal.

Anger slowly dissolved into fear as the months trickled by. My frustration at others not remembering, not caring, then became anger at myself for not being able to remember. The sadness of never being able to know the hundreds of layers of my mother was soon replaced by the anxiety that I didn’t remember what she was truly like while she was alive. The pictures placed on her dresser the day she died were now glued into a scrapbook, allowing me to replay the memories of her over and over again until they were committed to memory. Even then, the old videos on my sister’s phone shocked me when I realized I didn’t know my mother’s voice, at least not by heart. It was like losing religion, trying to hold onto something that I struggled to believe in. 

And so I continued my restless search for my mother in a world that no longer knew her. I looked in the obvious spot of her resting place, trying to figure out if it was truly her who was placed into the coffin. Then it was people—my dad, my grandmother, my sister. I wanted to pick away at her loved ones to see if their knowledge was more credible than mine. In the end, I only discovered that their versions of her differed from the concrete ideas I had always associated with her. No matter how long I searched, I kept returning to the same exhausting conclusion. My only option was to face the world alone and figure out who I was while being satisfied with the fleeting version of the mother from my memories. Wondering whether she would be proud of me, if I made the right decisions, and how she would fit into the life I created became daily occurrences. 

Then it hit me, not in the form of a catastrophic wave or a freight train, but in gentle ripples that began with a class assignment. I was flipping through pages of photos in the scrapbook of my mother, searching for an image that would work well in the family tree project assigned by my French teacher. I paused on a page, thinking I had found the right one. However, I was instead drawn to a striking photo on the bottom of the page, one of me and my mother smiling together. It was then that I realized how similar my cheeks were to her’s when we smiled. At another glance, I could see how our mouths turned upward in the same manner. Then, in a seemingly unrelated event, I was walking around my neighborhood one afternoon as day began to shift into night. The golden light of the sun bounced off my head, creating a glittering effect in my hair that reminded me of how my mother’s ruby waves would glisten under evening light. On another typical day, I was in the car with my dad when he jokingly complained that I was stubborn, how I inherited the trait from my mother’s side of the family. Though initially annoyed by the remark, I later felt a sense of pride at the fact that I was carrying on my mother even in her dramatic ways. 

In all of these instances, I discovered something that I was either previously ignoring or just too preoccupied to appreciate. I had reached the understanding of my mother that I had been searching for since the day of her death. I began to notice that she was woven through my body, my thoughts, and, above all, the world as I saw it through my own unique eyes. I saw everything around me as reliable proof that she too once walked the Earth in the many different versions of her life that came before me. Her existence weaved through the many layers of the world, leaving an impact that was now too hard to ignore. Her death had not killed her, for she could exist outside the confines of a physical presence. I could find her in my handwriting, the trees outside my bedroom window, and the vibrancy of a spring flower. I could see she was everywhere.