I feel like grief has been crippling me lately. Missing my mother has really been tearing me down. Her story is massive and yet I feel like I could relive it in my mind in five minutes, I think it just means I wanted more time with her. That feeling in itself is selfish because I certainly wasn’t deserving of making any demands of her, like sticking around longer. My mother was not perfect by any means, but I know that 98% of everything she did in her life was with the intention of helping others. I have heard the story over and over again for my entire life about the time we were robbed when I was a baby. Apparently the guys thought nobody was home when they broke in. My mom was upstairs with her three kids, myself and my two sisters, when she heard these guys enter the house. It was always told to me with the tone that my mom was completely petrified. Yet in that moment she held her own, barricading all of us in the room. She shoved furniture against the door of one of the bedrooms and we hid. I was so tiny my sister had to hold my mouth closed so I wouldn’t cry. Once when I was only a few years old I swallowed a tiny ball that was attached to a doll and almost died. My mom and her friend had to save me, called an ambulance, and each time I was told the story it always ended with “I was so afraid you would die... by a ******* ball”. She once got stabbed in the upper chest while working as a cashier at one of those all night corner grocery stores. The manager tried to ask how long it would be at the hospital and whether or not my mom would be back to finish shift, she swiftly told him to *******. She was so many things but mostly she never let life silence her. Criminal? Often. But more often than that she was the first person to go without to ensure someone else had. She was warm to so many others, rarely to her own children. The first time my heart experienced being broken, she simply told me it would happen again so don’t waste too much time dwelling on this one or that one. I was fortunate that I never experienced her in the throes of addiction when I was young, my older siblings watched her nearly **** herself when they were young. I believe it left me blinded to the signs when she put herself there again in my adult life. I had her back for a long time, fighting my siblings on the validity of what they were accusing her of but eventually I came to see what was going on. My mom would make me her version of shepherd's pie for my birthday every single year, no excuses, no missing it, she always made it. So per usual I showed up at her house on my birthday and the house wasn’t playing Fleetwood Mac, there was no food being prepped. It was quiet and sad. She was up in her room, locked away. I tried for over an hour to get her to open the door. I could smell the cigarettes, I could smell the incense, she was speaking to me so I knew she was in there and finally I gave up and left. My mom never made me shepherds pie again after that. She was in it, deep in the need to fill the voids that prescriptions were leaving. But I still followed her, one move from Champlin, Minneapolis, to Fridley. She was facing serious charges and prison time, a story for another day. We all thought she was accepting the set outcome. Suddenly she was just gone, packed up my little brother and drove to Indiana. I don’t know if she really thought they would just forget about her or if she was just riding with the fact that prison would mean detox. Drugs bring insanity. After she left I made the hard decision that her choices would mean that her relationship with myself was damaged, something almost beyond repair. So I kept my daughter from her, even eventually my son when he came along. The police did in face catch up with her, arrested her, transferred her back to Minnesota to complete her prison term. In all of that time I had temporary guardianship of my little brother, I had my son, I lost any real contact with my mother. We kept the required contact so that she could have a relationship with my little brother but that was where it stopped for her and I. In many ways prison was a good thing for her. She got sober, she did all the cliche classes and it felt like she was making progress as a human. Eventually she got out, so many steps later she found a place. Now the thing prison did not do well for her was her physical health. My mom lived with severe arthritis for all of her adult life, diagnosed and medicated from her early twenties, pins in her toes, knee replacement, elbow surgeries, etc. It was this way for as far back as I can remember. The prison system is not equipped to take care of someone who is that physically sick all the time, it’s just a fact. Couple these issues with long term drug use and lack of care, she came out worse off. So as great as she was doing mentally, she was quickly prescribed pain medicine again. So everyone tries, be present, check in, watch her medicine intake, help as much as humanly possible with everything you can. Now this is where guilt comes in. I forgave her for so many things, all the bad that she welcomed into her life and mine, I forgave her. Long before she died I had accepted everything that ever happened and forgave her. But I still didn’t open up my family to her, I deprived her of knowing my kids. I ask myself constantly if I would have done it differently if I knew she would be dying so soon and I can’t say I would have. So comes the guilt. I saved my children from watching my mother slowly **** herself, but I have moments where I am angry that she deprived them of having a healthy and happy Grandma. So more guilt. Guilt for not fixing it all, guilt for not being able to make her the best version of herself, guilt for being at work when she called me 5 hours before she died, guilt for not calling her back when I got off, guilt for cutting her off for those years. My mom was a pillar in my family, she was my one and only gateway to them. With the exception of the few years that she was gone and even with all the issues, my mom was my one and only person who kept me grounded and connected to my family. She didn’t allow me to remove myself from them. Now she’s gone and with her she took my connection to them and she left behind this constant fog. She gave me so many pieces of myself, some of them I have embraced and some I had to remove. The pain of her absence is something that cannot be expressed with words, it cannot be measured or taken away. It’s hard to explain the feeling when you lose the person who loves you, no matter what. Without question she loved me and knew me below the surface level, knew how unhappy I was, told me to fix my unhappiness because I was smart, beautiful... worthy of happiness and the next evening she left this place. Now something is always missing, something is always off, sadness is always a wolf chomping at my bones. Guilt and grief consume me, even when I try so hard to feel something. The things left on this planet that I still love feel so out of reach that I get lost and I just know that she would tell me something crazy, but it would work. Maybe it will never make sense but honestly I don’t know if that matters anymore.