On October 22, 2026, my mom died.

I have typed that sentence more than once now, and it still feels strange.

My mom died.

There are some sentences your brain understands before the rest of you knows what to do with them.

And if I’m being truthful, I didn’t lose my mom in the way people usually imagine losing a mother.

Our relationship was complicated.

There were long periods when we didn’t speak at all. In fact, there were more years of my adult life when we weren’t talking than years when we were.

Over the last year or so, we had started communicating again through email. It wasn’t a perfectly repaired relationship. There wasn’t some movie-ending reconciliation where everything that had happened suddenly made sense and we both knew exactly what to say.

It was just… something.

A connection.

A thread.

She was still there.

And now she isn’t.

I thought I had already grieved her

That is probably one of the strangest parts of this.

When a relationship has been painful or distant for a long time, you grieve pieces of it while the person is still alive.

You grieve the relationship you wish you had.

You grieve conversations that never happened.

You grieve the version of your family you kept hoping might exist someday.

You grieve years you can’t get back.

So when my mom died, part of me thought, Haven’t I already done this?

Apparently not.

Because there is a difference between grieving what you didn’t have and grieving the fact that there will never be another opportunity to have it.

Death closes the door in a way distance never does.

Even during the years when we weren’t speaking, she existed somewhere in the world.

There could always be another email.

Another conversation.

Another disagreement.

Another chance.

Another attempt.

And I think I underestimated how much simply knowing she was still there mattered.

Relief and grief can exist at the same time

This is the part people don’t talk about enough.

There is relief in knowing there will never be another fight.

There is relief in knowing I don’t have to worry about what she thinks or how she feels about something I do.

There is relief in knowing there won’t be another painful cycle between us.

And there is grief.

Real grief.

Those things do not cancel each other out.

Relief does not mean I didn’t love her.

Pain in our relationship does not mean her death doesn’t hurt.

Being estranged does not make someone less your mother.

And feeling something other than devastation every second does not mean you are grieving incorrectly.

I’m learning that grief has absolutely no interest in being emotionally convenient.

You can laugh and then cry twenty minutes later.

You can feel peaceful in the morning and completely unsettled that night.

You can miss somebody and still remember exactly why the relationship was difficult.

You can wish things had been different without pretending they actually were.

You don’t just grieve the person. You grieve the whole story.

There was no clean ending

I think humans desperately want endings to make sense.

We want the final conversation.

The apology.

The reconciliation.

The moment where everybody understands everybody else.

Sometimes we get that.

Sometimes we don’t.

My relationship with my mom did not end tied up in a beautiful bow.

But I’m realizing I don’t have to rewrite our history now that she is gone.

I don’t have to turn a complicated relationship into a perfect one to prove that I loved her.

And I don’t have to focus only on the painful parts to justify the boundaries I had while she was alive.

Both were real.

The love was real.

The hurt was real.

The distance was real.

The connection was real.

And the loss is real.

This is my first loss like this

I have experienced loss before.

Grandparents have died. Relationships have ended. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had chapters of my life disappear before I was ready to let them go.

But this feels different.

This is the first time death has reached this close into my life and changed something that has existed for as long as I have.

She was my mom before I understood what having a mom meant.

Whatever our relationship eventually became, she was woven into the beginning of my story.

And now I’m figuring out how to live in a world where she is part of my past instead of someone who still exists somewhere in my present.

I don’t know yet what that looks like.

It has only been days.

I’m not writing this from the other side of grief.

I’m writing from inside it.

Faith doesn’t require me to pretend this doesn’t hurt

I believe in God.

I believe death is not the end.

I believe there is hope bigger than the part of the story I can see right now.

And I am still sad.

I think sometimes Christians accidentally make grief harder by trying to rush ourselves toward the hopeful sentence.

We know the verses.

We know what we believe.

But faith does not require us to skip the part where something hurts.

Jesus Himself wept.

So right now, I’m allowing myself to believe God is here without requiring myself to understand everything He is doing.

Some days that faith may look strong.

Some days it may look like, “God, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with this.”

I think He can handle both.

Maybe grief doesn’t need to be figured out

That might be what I’m learning most right now.

My instinct with almost everything is to untangle it.

Figure out what I’m feeling.

Understand why I’m feeling it.

Decide what I’m supposed to do next.

But grief may not be something you solve.

Maybe sometimes the next right thing is simply allowing the feeling that showed up today to exist.

Not judging it.

Not comparing it to somebody else’s grief.

Not asking whether you are sad enough.

Or too sad.

Or relieved too quickly.

Or functioning too well.

Or falling apart too much.

Just letting grief be what it is.

Because there probably isn’t one correct way to grieve a complicated person.

There certainly isn’t one correct way to grieve a complicated mother.

If your grief doesn’t match the sympathy cards

If you are reading this because you have lost someone and your feelings do not match the sympathy cards, I want you to know something I am trying to learn myself:

You don’t have to simplify your relationship just because the person died.

You don’t have to erase the hurt.

You don’t have to manufacture beautiful memories.

You don’t have to defend the good ones.

You don’t have to choose between loving them and acknowledging what was hard.

And you don’t have to explain why you’re grieving someone you had already spent years grieving.

Grief is still grief. Love is still love. Loss is still loss. Even when the story was complicated.

And maybe, for today, we don’t have to untangle all of it.

Maybe we just do the next right thing.

And trust that God will meet us there.

— Ali

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