On Celebrating a Non-Celebration

Thirty years ago today, my mother died. I am now the same age she was on that day. And being here is so much scarier than I’d thought.

This isn’t a story about grief — not really. My grief for the loss of my mother was complicated, because our relationship was complicated. After she died, there were nights I howled with pain for hours on end. There were days I felt relieved, as if I’d experienced a reprieve from judgment. And there was, of course, just about everything in between.

A therapist once told me that grief, like other strong emotions, can be best conceptualized as a spiral. You deal with it, she said; and then another milestone comes by — another curve on the spiral — and you deal with it again, but differently. Another curve, another milestone, another different approach to the same emotion, because we’re all growing and changing all the time. I am not the same person I was thirty years ago. My grief, like many other things about me, has changed.

But what makes this anniversary — this twist on that spiral — so different from all the others? It’s that for the first time I’m feeling alone. Up until now, I’ve been able to gauge my life and my progress and my triumphs and my failures against hers. I knew what she had been like, at almost every age I hit. When I turned forty, I remembered her at forty. We were extraordinarily…