Today marks my mom’s second birthday since she passed, and even now, it’s hard to put into words what that means.
Grief doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t lessen on a schedule or fade in predictable ways. It just changes. Some days, I find myself laughing at old memories, like the way she could discipline with a well-aimed flying shoe, or how she had an endless capacity to bring stray animals and people into our home. Other days, the absence is heavier, like when I instinctively think to call her or when I remember something she’d have found amusing.
Janice Howard wasn’t just my mom, she was my role model. She taught me resilience, that nothing was impossible if I just kept trying. She showed me what it meant to be compassionate, to question things that didn’t seem right, and to see life from different perspectives.
There are things I miss that seem so small but meant so much. Our Saturday afternoon talks. The list of chores she’d have ready for me whenever I visited. The way she’d recount the antics of the birds on her back deck or the chipmunk she named Chippy. Even her stubborn refusal to believe computers should ever require troubleshooting.
With Easter right around the corner, I find myself remembering how she would put together Eater egg hunts; plastic eggs filled with chocolates hidden all over the house and outside. She took it seriously. So seriously that months later, you’d still find one behind a curtain or tucked into a bookshelf. Eventually, she stopped doing them for us, but by then it had become a tradition. When my first nephew was born, she started them again, and she loved watching him run around trying to find the eggs just as much. A part of me still expects to find one of those old eggs somewhere.
The last couple of years were difficult, watching her struggle with illness, but I take comfort in knowing she’s no longer in pain. I like to think of her free now, watching over us, maybe laughing at some of my choices but still proud.
Grief, I’m learning, is just love with nowhere to go. And every memory is a way it finds its way back.
Happy birthday, Mom. I miss you every day.
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