Year 1

The first year is hard to recall with clarity except for the moment she died. She is in her own bed. I sit beside her and wish, with my whole heart, that I can die in her place. Is that such a strange thing to wish for? I am her mother, after all.

I walk around with an ache that squeezes my chest and takes my strength away. I am looking for her, searching for signs in every corner of the physical world for the baby who had grown into the child who had spent a few glorious years as a teenager until she vanished completely.

Well, not completely. Her ashes are in a handmade ceramic urn with a hummingbird painted on it.

I search and weep and gaze at the sky trying to make sense of the gaping hole in my life. I find some comfort in walks and poetry and birds, but there is no real solace for me. I fold cranes and I collect feathers and I learn how to attract hummingbirds to my yard.

I don't work much. I want (fervently and selfishly) to die by some natural or unexpected cause — cancer, infection, the random miscalculation of a careless driver. I hate the world — and myself — for continuing to move forward without my sweet girl.

Year 2

It's like the throbbing, intractable pain of surgery that hits you when the anesthesia wears off. Except the pain is in my mind and my heart and my raw, aching soul.

The early confusion begins to lift and life crashes back into focus. But the ache in my chest remains as the full reality of her absence hits me. This year marks my return to some kind of "normal" rhythm — to clients and deadlines and an attempt to reconnect with living things.

I fall back into the daily practice of writing. I try to keep my younger daughter from getting lost in her own grief. I will ultimately fail miserably at this.

I make the birds my own. They fill my mind, distracting me from grief. I watch them for hours — on trails and in the yard and perched on carefully trimmed hedges in grocery store parking lots.

I can't stop looking up. Once, when I am driving on an expansive country highway, a flock of crows flies overhead. I have to drag my eyes away from them and back to the road. For a moment, I feel as if I've lost control of my mind and I am gliding above myself with the crows. I am terrified, disoriented. The feeling of helpless confusion lasts until year 3.

Year 3

I think I am getting a grip on my grief. I pivot the focus of my work to writing. This allows me to structure my days into chunks of time — time to write, time to walk, time to nap, and time to sit in silence.

I had turned Ana's bedroom into my office about six months after she died. Now, three years later, I've grown used to starting the day by walking into the space that was once hers, sitting at my desk, and staring outside at the bird feeders.

But I can't forget that she took her final breath just a few feet from where I sit each day, writing for clients or for myself or for no one at all. Absurdly, this gives me comfort. I'm in her room where her essence remains.

By now, I have enough clarity to understand that I need to get out of this house and begin to truly reconnect with other people. This is the year I begin to forge deeper friendships. It's the year that my daughter Emily turns 15, the same age that Ana was when she died.

It's the year I start trying to imagine the rest of my life. It's also the year I indulge far too much in wine and weed, frequently losing myself to stoned oblivion.

I am doing well. I have moments of real happiness. I miss Ana as much as I did that first year, but the constant ache that plagued my chest is lifting.

Emily and I dust off the old PS4 and play video games for the first time since her sister died. I am optimistic, but I am also different — slower, sadder, and less resilient. Although I accept that my life must go on without Ana, I continue to wish for a fatal diagnosis.

I don't want to die. But since death is my only path to Ana, I wish for it often, then I let go of the thought only to have it again. Missing her is vast. It's enormous. It's a silence I can't describe. She's been gone for so long. How is this possible?

Year 4

A global pandemic turns everything to shit. The friendships I am building fracture and fade. Death is the prevailing topic on social media and in the news. My feeds are filled with everyone's fear. I spend the evenings stoned and watch, with helpless horror, as Emily does the same.

She sinks into despair and I can't do anything about it. The year is spent on a razor's edge of hypervigilance. I recognize how close we all are to disaster because I have been here before. But the three of us are strong — my husband, Emily, and me.

I stop drinking. I toss out the weed. I realize, after a few weeks of missing these things, that they've been preventing me from facing my grief. Clarity returns and so does pain, just as it did the first year after Ana died. My focus is on helping Emily navigate her own journey through hell.

She is 17 now and, along with the pandemic, she is feeling the full weight of missing her sister. She spends her junior year in bed, curled around her laptop, trying to muster the energy to pay attention to virtual school. I hover and worry and nag. I clean her room. I beg her to talk to me. I step back and give her space. Somehow, we make it through year four, but only barely.

Year 5

I start the year one month sober and swear I won't drink wine or dabble in weed ever again. I keep my promise to myself. People are venturing out. We're all vaccinated. Emily starts her senior year of high school. She reconnects with friends. But she has lost something ineffable during the isolated pandemic months. She's not the student she was. She only wants to see her friends and sleep.

Year 5 is about Emily to the extent that I forget about my own grief, for a while. The first six months of the year are the hardest. But then there is a shift and suddenly we are talking about our grief as a family, the things we've lost, and the important roles we all play in each other's life.

Something else remarkable happens in year five. My humor returns. I laugh more. I make dumb jokes. I begin to sing as I do housework (terribly, off key, without any sense of melody). I used to do this when the girls were little. I'd sing the songs I love, but terribly.

Ana and Emily could both sing. When they were very little, they could recognize good music. When I sang off-key, Ana would put her hands over her ears. Emily would cover my mouth with her chubby toddler hand and say, "No, Mommy. Don't sing." Now Emily rolls her eyes. Now she patiently tries to show me how to find the melody.

She is slowly emerging from the darkness that swallowed her during the pandemic. And me? I've stopped wishing that a terrible disease will shorten my life. Well, mostly.

Year 6

Year six without Ana begins with a too-warm winter and my commitment to make the most of spring, when it finally comes. I got Covid the previous year and was sick for over a month. Then I had heart palpitations that took a while to diagnose, so I stopped exercising until May after I got the all-clear from a cardiologist.

I gain a lot of weight, then lose some of it, then gain it back. I train on my bike (indoors) four days a week during the coldest months, then start my morning hikes in spring and continue through the fall.

I sing — badly — and play video games with Emily. I follow her around and nag her to eat and clean her room and do grown-up things like check her email. She turns 19 and my role of daily mothering begins to shift into something different. I start therapy again and discover I have more time to focus on writing and art and work.

I pictur Ana as a grown woman and, heart aching, wonder what she'd think of me and Emily and the world — all of it having moved forward without her.

Year 7

This year was only remarkable in that it was so unremarkable. I gain and lose weight yet again, join a writing group, make some new friends. I write an essay about Ana that goes wildly viral, a story about her imaginary world.

It's a year that marks a pause in my life, a pivot, a deep breath inward as I confront peri-menopause and aging. It's a year of endings and beginnings. Emily turns 20. She gets sober. She becomes my best friend.

Ana feels more distant than ever this year. I stop folding cranes. I stop visiting the spots Ana loved on her birthday and the day she died. Instead, I invoke Ana on walks. I write about her with joy. I plant my first flower garden and decorate it with stone frogs and trinkets that I know Ana would love.

There is less to say after all this time. The world is harder to live in than ever, but I'm grateful for the blessings that remain — my family, my home, and the ability to move through life slowly.

Year 8

This year starts with me learning how to paint with watercolor. Though I often fail miserably, it's a hobby that brings me joy.

I still live in this place of grief. Well, maybe that's not really the right way to put it anymore. Grief lives inside of me, but I'm once again immersed in life.

For me, that means a full schedule of work and some tentative things to look forward to. I'm excited to start working on my garden again in a few weeks. I'm enjoying the process of making art. I'm committed to reading more novels and books after a few years of not reading much at all. I'm still attending my writing group. We meet once a month and share our poetry and essays with each other.

I'm watching Emily blossom into an amazing young woman. She turns 21 next month and has started pursuing a career in horticulture and gardening.

I think of Ana, always and often. Sometimes when I putter around the house singing at the top of my lungs, I wonder if she's nearby, just beyond the veil, plugging her ears and laughing.

I'm making a slow but steady move over to Substack. I have begun republishing my work in a newsletter called The Halfway Path. I'm also publishing original pieces that aren't on Medium (unboosted pieces for now). I hope you'll join me there. All my work is currently free to access.