Some Dates Stay With Us

A few years before my mom's passing...on the left myself Nancy - Mom - Kay (my sister)

Some dates stay with us.

Not always loudly.
Not always with tears.
But somewhere in the body… they remain.

April 27, 2026 marked 37 years since my mother passed.

She was 62.

I was six months pregnant with my son.

At the time, I did what many of us do when life asks too much at once.

I stayed steady.
I stayed functional.
I stayed quiet.

And for a long time, I thought that meant I had grieved.

I hadn’t.

Grief does not always arrive when the loss does.

Sometimes it waits.

Sometimes it settles quietly into the body and stays there—unspoken, unprocessed, tucked beneath the responsibilities of living.

And for many of us, especially women, life does not pause to make room for sorrow.

There are children to raise.
Meals to make.
Work to do.
People to care for.
And so we do what we know how to do.

We keep going.

Not because we are untouched.
Because we must.

And somewhere along the way, we convince ourselves that functioning is the same thing as healing.

It isn’t.

Recently, a lovely group of women gathered at my home for a floating sound journey to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

The evening was meant to be light. Joyful. A celebration.

But as often happens when women gather and feel safe enough to soften, something deeper emerged.

The birthday girl shared that birthdays have been hard for her for years. Her grandfather—someone she loved deeply—passed away close to her birthday, and ever since, celebration has carried grief alongside it.

I understood immediately.

My mother passed just weeks before Mother’s Day.

Some dates carry memory in ways the body never forgets.

And as the evening unfolded, nearly every woman shared some version of the same truth:

loss had touched her too.

What began as celebration quietly made room for grief.

And in many ways, that felt honest.

Because life asks us to hold both.

Joy and sorrow.
Celebration and longing.
Love and loss.

Not separately.
Together.

That may be one of the hardest truths to accept—that grief and joy are not opposites.

They live beside one another.

The deeper we have loved, the more likely it is we will meet both in the same breath.

At one point, someone asked how we connect with those we’ve lost.

And the first thing I said surprised even me.

I told them my truth.

It wasn’t until 2022—more than three decades later—that I truly allowed myself to grieve my mother.

Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But slowly.

Through stillness.
Through quiet reflection.
Through meditation.

And over time, without forcing it, my heart softened.

I cried.
I remembered.
I mourned.

And in that quiet, something shifted.

Not answers.
Not certainty.

But a softer kind of knowing.

A feeling.
A presence.
A love that felt closer than grief had allowed me to notice.

Towards the end of the event, the birthday girl offered each guest a butterfly to release—an invitation to think of someone they loved and let go.

It was simple. Beautiful. Symbolic.

A small act of remembrance.
A quiet act of trust.

And maybe that is what stillness makes possible.

Not answers.
Not certainty.

A softer heart.
A deeper knowing.
And love that never really leaves.



Later, a bright red cardinal appeared in the yard during the gathering.

Coincidence, perhaps.

Or maybe just one of those quiet moments that asks nothing of us except to notice.

Either way, it felt like a reminder.

Love has a way of finding us again.

Especially when we are still enough to feel it.