A few years ago, a psychic shared a past life story about my mother and me. In it, we were in Russia in the 1600s. I was her mother. She was born with disabilities I didn't know how to navigate, and I spent that entire life oscillating between fierce devotion and deep frustration — championing her and failing her in equal measure. I died around fifty, and only as I was crossing over did I finally see her clearly: not the broken mind, but the bright soul trapped inside it. I carried that regret into our next life together. This one.
When the psychic shared this, it landed with the weight of something I already knew. And when my mom was diagnosed with cancer a few years later, I understood that I needed to be there at the end — because the story was asking to be finished differently this time.
My relationship with my mother was the most difficult one I've ever had. We'd go months without speaking. I couldn't tolerate the guilt I felt for the distance I imposed, but I didn't know another way to manage it. I longed for her approval — something she didn't necessarily withhold, but for me, it was never enough. I got so little warmth from her as a child, and watching her poor decisions bred an innate feeling that I needed to rescue her.
She carried a kind of victim mentality, perpetually plagued by health issues I believed she'd manifested with her outlook. Her circumstances were the product of her own choices, and I rejected the idea that anyone or anything else was responsible for the outcomes of a life. Mine or hers. And despite the constant struggle, there were luminous moments. Lunches at Neiman's — tortilla soup and shared chicken salad sandwiches. Times she told me she was proud of me. Times she expressed disappointment so heavy it sat in my chest for weeks.
I loved my mom and resented her deeply at the same time.
Now, I can't believe she's gone, and that I'm standing on this place in the timeline of my life.
I hardly left her side in her last nine days. Towards the end, when it was time to maximize her dosage of morphine, the hospice nurse told me, "This is the last time you will ever see your mother conscious. If you have anything else to say to her, now's the time." She was already so medicated she could barely open her eyes, but she looked at me. I grabbed her hand and spoke. I don't remember what I said — even though it was barely 5 months ago — but I will never forget the feeling. Something tore through me from the base of my belly upward, like a blade as I said my final goodbye. I wailed in a way I had never cried before. I never saw my mother's eyes open again.
The day before she went to hospice, my mom told me I hadn't ever said I was glad she was my mother. And she was right. I had done everything I could to support her through ten months of cancer, but I hadn't said that. I stood there unwilling to lie to her — but unwilling to deny her a peaceful goodbye. So I walked out of her hospital room, called my husband, and asked what I should do. What could I say to this woman who had tried her best, but left so many scars?
He said, "Why don't you sit down and make a list of all the reasons you really are grateful for her. I know there are some."
Where could I begin, I asked myself. And then something struck me. Just days before, our company had hosted a workshop, and the instructor offered two ideas I carried with me:
I took out my notebook and fountain pen — tools I always carry — and wrote the number 1 on the first blank page. What else could be true?
I started replaying the events of our life, and suddenly I saw how much subtext I'd been layering onto the facts. Suddenly, I saw things clearly. So many of my mother's mistakes — mistakes I'd always felt were aimed at me — were not the stories I had told myself.
She didn't "announce" that she'd lost a pregnancy when I was eleven. I was sitting in her room while she was on the phone with her sister. Tammy — I lost the baby. And as soon as it left her lips, she hung up and tried to explain things to me the way a child could understand. She never meant for me to carry that. It fell out of her mouth.
Countless stories I'd calcified into identity had happened — but not the way I remembered them.
Two pages of genuine gratitude for my mom poured out of me — gratitude I was able to share with her before she died.
And just as I somehow knew it would — as it had at the end of our life together in Russia — my perspective on my mother shifted entirely. Over the following days, it continued to move. I sat at her bedside with family, with her girlfriends who gathered to say goodbye, and I saw that these women truly loved her. That the version of my mother I had constructed was real, but incomplete.
After the funeral, my younger sister — permanently limited to the mind of a twelve-year-old — started asking me questions about death and heaven. I turned to ChatGPT to find a way to explain my beliefs in a language she could grasp. I kept asking it to simplify, and finally it arrived at something that hasn't left me since:
Life is like a book. When you finish reading, the book isn't gone — it just finds a home on your shelf. Your story doesn't disappear. You're simply done reading it.
That metaphor explains so much about my own experience with time. I've always carried an impatience for life — a deep drive to achieve, and a fear that I wouldn't complete what I came here to do. But as I've gotten older, that urgency has quieted. Not because I have less ambition, but because it's clearer to me now that there's no way to mess it up. The book is already written. Every day I experience another page. I don't know what the next chapter holds, but I carry the innate knowledge that it's already there.
A part of me longs for death — not in a morbid way, but the way a reader longs to see how a great story resolves. I no longer grapple with free will the way I once did. In my youth, predestination seemed absurd — who could believe they didn't control their own life? But control and authorship aren't the same thing.
My mother's book is closed now.
Mine is still open. And for the first time, I'm not skipping ahead.