Do you remember the first weeks of the pandemic? Six years ago this week, the world stopped. The roads were quiet. Schools were closed. Grocery store shelves were empty. Everyone was wiping down packages like they had just come out of a biohazard lab. Stores ran out of toilet paper. Calendars emptied overnight. The phrase “unprecedented times” became the soundtrack of 2020.
Life as we knew it suddenly stopped.
Sports were canceled. Church moved online. Kids were home all day. Work spilled into every corner of the house. Every small errand felt different because everything around us had changed. We all kept waiting for life to restart, for things to go back to the way they were before. Now, six years later, life mostly has gone back to normal. Kids are back on the fields, restaurants are full again, you’re not standing 6 feet apart in lines. The phrase social distancing feels like something from a strange chapter of history. Calendars look like calendars again instead of blank pages.
A couple of years after the pandemic, it felt like my world had stopped again.
And suddenly, I understood what people mean when they say, “I don’t know how you survive losing a parent…” This time, it wasn’t a global pandemic; it was my mom dying. People often say things like, “I don’t know how you do it,” or “I don’t know how I would survive losing my mom.” The honest answer is…neither did I. And honestly, some days I still don’t. No one really knows how they’ll survive grief until they’re living inside it. If you lived through the first weeks of the pandemic, you might actually understand more about grief than you realize. Losing my mom felt a lot like those early weeks when the world slowed down… Not because I was afraid and not because I felt alone, but because everything familiar changed. Life as I knew it, paused. When my mom died, the world didn’t stop. People still went to work. Kids still had games. Mother’s Day still happened one week later. Grocery stores still stocked shelves. But inside my life, everything shifted just as dramatically.
Grief is strange like that. The world keeps moving forward, but part of you feels frozen in a quiet, empty space, wondering how everyone else keeps going.
Motherhood makes that absence even louder because there are a thousand moments a day when you wish you could call her: How did you handle this stage? Is this normal? Am I doing this right? Help…please?! Instead, you figure it out as you go. You pack lunches. Sign permission slips. Remind the kids to brush their teeth (again). Show up for games and school events. You become the mom, without the mom. And sometimes, deep down, you still feel like the kid who needs hers. The pandemic gave all of us a glimpse into what grief feels like. The quiet. The pause. The sense that life has been interrupted and might never feel the same. The difference is that eventually, the world reopened. Schedules filled back up. Gatherings resumed. Life moved forward.
But you see, grief doesn’t work like that. There isn’t a reopening date. There’s no “back to normal” sign. You just wake up in a new life you never asked for and try to make it through. This week marks six years since the world slowed down. And tomorrow, March 14 would have been my mom’s birthday. A big one at that, 60 years!
These two dates sit next to each other in my mind now: the week the world paused and remembering my mom on her birthday. Life can change in an instant. The things we assume will always be there sometimes aren’t. But love doesn’t disappear when someone is gone. It lives in the ways we show up for our kids. In the things we say that sound suspiciously like our moms. When I look at my hands, I see hers. When I am around my little sister, I see my mom’s mannerisms. Love for her lives in the quiet ways we carry someone forward, even when they’re gone.
So, if you’ve read through this thinking, here she is writing about her mom again…yes. Yes, I am. Because this is one way I can carry her forward, especially during her birthday week. We all experienced the same pandemic, but not everyone has experienced losing a parent. And maybe, in some small way, sharing this will help someone else understand grief, not as an abstract idea, but as a lived experience.
