My mom died three years ago today.

Katrina Goldsaito writes and makes performance about grief and I learned from reading her first welcome, grief newsletter recently the way they mark death in Japan: at 7 days, every 7 days until the 49th day, 100 days, a year, 3 years, 7, then 13, then 17, then 33, 49, and after 99 years. Like Katrina, I find this structure comforting. A way to hold something that at times feels impossible to grasp.

Three years is not a long time. It has been a long three years.

That September 7th was a Thursday and for the next few weeks I counted every Thursday, feeling the weeks click by: the first full week without her in the world, two weeks, another Thursday she will not open her eyes to greet. I remember how I longed for time to stop; how I couldn't quite wish for her not to have died, that seemed too impossible, but I longed to stay closer to the time when she was still alive. The tightness in my chest hugged my heart harder each week. I tracked her good-bye, day by day, week by week.

The last months of my mom's life were painful; she was sick and scared and everything happened so fast. I am still not sure how to talk about what it was like to care for her. I know that I am grateful that I was able to be back home for much of that summer. It was almost surreal to sleep in the bed where I grew up and cross the hall to see telehealth therapy clients from my childhood playroom; I would talk to trans people about experiences with their families, then walk downstairs to help my dad push liquid diet through my mom's feeding tube.

The summer was slow and hot. I flew back to Pennsylvania when my mom insisted I needed to be with my family and got on a plane back to Myrtle Beach when chemotherapy was going badly or I simply longed to be there in this new permutation of our triad, the three of us in the house together like and unlike before. Mom would tell me she was fine, it was ok, no rush, come if you can, but when I would arrive, she would admit that it felt better when I was there. That she was less afraid.

My mom went to the hospital for the last time on my 40th birthday. She was in intensive care and having complication from treatment but I arrived three days later believing I was there to help her transition to being back at home. I spent that Wednesday night curled up in a chair beside her bed; she proudly introduced me to the nurse, "This is my Leigh," smiling as she told them I was a therapist. I stayed the next morning, trading places with my aunts and uncle and dad, with a cousin across the day. Her great friend and the retired minister from our church came by and gave me a hug after sitting with her.

I left that evening to sleep and I don't remember if she had already stopped speaking. I don't know exactly the last words she said in this world or to me but I know the last ones I said to her: I love you, my mama. I expected to see her in the morning.

That night, I got into my mom's side of my parent's bed with the dog curled in his, and my dad called to tell me to come back. She was dying.

My mama died surrounded by her family. I knelt by her side and thanked her for all that she had taught me, all that she had shown me with her love that would continue to live in me. I held her hand and thanked her for how she prepared me to grieve by being open with her own grief for her mother and I told her that I would miss her every day for the rest of my life, just like she told me she missed Nannie. My cousin arrived after driving twelve hours from New York City in time to hold onto me while we said goodbye.

I am marking these long three years in part by writing this part of the story this way; I have been writing about and to my mom since that night I spent with her in the ICU and I am searching for how to tell more of what her life and death have meant to me. The deep shadows of grief have also offered new light, new ways of knowing what it means to be alive to all of what it means to be human. My heart has opened toward grief as a process of transformation, as a profound experience of change, and a place of shared connection with each and every other person.

Here is what I wrote about her when she died; I called myself her daughter one last time because that is how she understood me. I have come to believe that now she knows my transness in a new way and loves all the parts of me that she struggled to hold in this life. And here is the Mary Oliver poem, "When Death Comes", that I found tucked into her bible and read at her funeral. The final lines are a guide to how I seek to live in the wake of my mother's death and amidst the grief of collapse in this era of catastrophe and violence:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I have transformed across these days, weeks, months, years of my dead mom. I am not who I was when the certainty of her love was still held in her body, when her voice could travel through the telephone, when I could sit next to her as she tucked into her spot in the corner of the couch. Relationships are shaped differently because she is no longer influencing them. More of her things live in my house, art she chose hangs on my walls and all the picture albums are in my cabinets because the house we had for nearly 40 years does not belong to us anymore. I am not a daughter or a son or a child to a mother now.

I must hold more of the ache of the world. And there is an odd pleasure in that. It is the gift of growing older, encountering another morning on this earth - to experience more of what it is to be alive means more responsibility to offer what that teaches, to contribute to the aliveness of the rest. I think my mom was a teacher preparing me for that in life and in death.

This three years has been so full and so brief. Oh my mama, my mama, my mama.

Thank you.