A Thousand Mornings Without You

The first morning without her felt like the sky had forgotten how to breathe.

It wasn’t quiet. It was hollow. The kind of silence that seeps into your bones and makes the ticking of the kitchen clock sound like thunder. I stood in her kitchen—the one she had kept like a sacred shrine of warmth and smells and cinnamon—and all I could think was how her favorite mug still sat by the sink, waiting for a hand that would never return.

My mother wasn’t just a woman. She was a symphony. A mixture of coffee spoons clinking, the scent of fresh laundry, and the lullabies she hummed out of habit more than memory. She moved through the world with a softness that could still a storm, and a strength that made mountains feel like mere bumps in the road.

Growing up, I was difficult. Moody, sharp-tongued, and eager to grow into someone that wasn’t constantly defined as "Catherine's daughter." But she loved me in the quiet way only mothers know. She never demanded my affection, never scolded my distance. She just... stayed. A lighthouse in every storm I created.

She wrote me notes.

Not letters. Notes. Scribbled messages left on bathroom mirrors, in lunch bags, under pillows—tiny lifelines that said things like: “You are more than enough,” “I’m proud of you, even when you’re not proud of yourself,” and once, after a terrible teenage argument, simply: “I love you anyway.”

Those notes used to irritate me. I mistook them for guilt-trips or smothering. But now, I would give anything to find just one more. To feel the curl of her handwriting again. To trace the ink of her words with my fingertips and believe, for just a second, that she was still here.

Her illness came suddenly. A few tired mornings. A cough that lingered. Then, within weeks, a diagnosis: late-stage cancer, already spreading like wildfire through the body that once carried me, cradled me, fed me with hands and love and sacrifice.

She handled it like she handled everything—with grace.

“I’ve had a beautiful life,” she told me in one of our last lucid conversations. “I had you. That alone is more than many get.”

I wanted to scream. That wasn’t enough. Not for her. She deserved more years, more sunrises, more of everything. But she just squeezed my hand, her eyes tired but filled with peace. “You’ll be okay. I raised you to be.”

And here I am. Trying to be.

It’s been 427 mornings without her. I count them because I want to remember the weight of her absence. Not to punish myself, but to honor her presence. Because the truth is, she’s not really gone. She shows up in places I least expect—when I open a window and the air smells like jasmine, her favorite flower. When I sing along to the radio and realize I’m using her exact harmony. When I catch myself saying something kind to a stranger, something she would have said.

Love like hers doesn’t die. It just changes form.

I recently found one last note. Tucked in an old book she lent me years ago and I never returned. It was faded, the ink almost erased by time and maybe tears. It read: “If you ever feel alone, just remember—I’m part of the stars, the sky, the sea. And every beat of your heart is one we still share.”

I held that note to my chest and wept.

Because a mother’s love is like gravity—it holds you together when everything else is falling apart. It isn’t loud or flashy. It is in the everyday moments, in the care, in the listening, in the staying.

I am my mother’s daughter.

And even in her absence, she loves me louder than ever.


For every soul who misses a mother: your grief is the echo of an extraordinary love. Let it remind you that you were cherished. Always.