The Weight of Twenty-Two

The call came at 9:07 AM on a Saturday, the kind of hour when the world feels suspended between yesterday's mistakes and tomorrow's uncertainties. I had been awake anyway, staring at the ceiling of my small but spacious bedroom, wrestling with the familiar cocktail of anxiety and ambition that had become my constant companion since everything went downhill just weeks ago. The phone's shrill cry cut through the silence like a blade, and somehow, even before I answered, I knew.

"Hey" my father's voice was hollow, scraped raw. "You need to get here."

The words that followed—, "your mom is gasping for air"—seemed to float around me like debris from a shipwreck. I found myself rushing around, as if my mother could see me, as if rushing could somehow make the impossible words make sense. My mother, who had been just fifty and vibrant and had talked to me just yesterday about how she loved me, was gone.

The drive there felt like it took four hours, and I remember every single mile of it. I moved through the world like a sleepwalker, my body performing the necessary functions while my mind reeled in disbelief. At twenty-two, death had always been theoretical, something that happened to other people's families, something distant and abstract. I've only ever had to attend exactly one funeral in my life— my uncles when I was fourteen—and even then, it hadn't felt like this.

This was different. This was my mother, who had called me every day without fail, who had worried about me and my eating habits and my constant tendency to stay up too late, who had been planning on me to visit her the following day and take care of her. My mother, who had been the steady constant in my life, the person who answered the phone no matter what time I would call, no matter how trivial the crisis.

The house felt wrong when I arrived. Everyone gathered outside the house well past two in the afternoon, staring at each other in disbelief and anger. The silence was oppressive; broken only by the hum of the cars passing. I wanted to scream at the normalcy of it all—how dare the clock keep ticking when my mother's heart had stopped?

"I don't know what to do," my father said without looking up. Every day before this, he had always seemed invincible to us, the problem-solver, the one who fixed broken faucets and negotiated with insurance companies and knew exactly what to do in any crisis. Now he looked smaller somehow, diminished, as if grief had physically shrunk him.

I sat down across from him, my hands softly on his back like when I was a child. "We'll figure it out," I heard myself say, though I had no idea what "it" even was. The grief, I suppose. The phone calls to relatives. The thousand small tasks that death apparently required of the living.

The next few days passed in a blur, hushed conversations with funeral directors, and the surreal experience of choosing flowers for someone who would never see them. I found myself thrust into the role of adult in ways that nobody had ever prepared me for. I fielded calls from my mother's friends, made decisions about music and readings, and watched my father navigate his grief with the lost expression of someone who had forgotten how to exist without his partner of twenty-eight years.

"She was so proud of you," person after person told me, and each time, the words felt like both a comfort and a knife. Proud of what? I always wondered. That I was learning to live? ​That I was figuring out who I was? That at twenty-two, I was more lost than ever?

But the story that follows is how I learned to understand that pride, to understand my mother in ways I never could when she was alive. This is the story of losing her, and somehow, in the strangest of ways, finding her again.

It wasn't until I was going through my mother's things a week later that she began to understand. In my mother's drawer, I found a notebook labeled with a page for every single one of her kids in her careful handwriting. Inside was supposed to be a letter that was designated for each of us after she had passed. Memories, what to do, what not to do, and then lastly how proud she was of each and every single one of us. Her gift and curse, in many ways: she always loved us more than we loved ourselves.

I sat beside my mother's bed, surrounded by the evidence of her quiet, constant love, and finally cried. Not the polite tears I had shed since her diagnoses, but the raw, ugly sobs of someone who had just realized the magnitude of what she had lost. My mother hadn't just been proud of my accomplishments; she had been proud of me in general, of the person I was becoming, of the journey I was on as a mother even when I couldn't see the destination.

The grief that followed was unlike anything I had ever imagined. It wasn't the dramatic, movie-version of loss I had expected, all black clothes and dramatic gestures. Instead, it was mundane and persistent, woven into the fabric of ordinary days. It was reaching for my phone to call my mother before remembering. It was seeing something funny and having no one to share it with who would laugh in exactly the right way. It was the hollow feeling in my chest when I realized that all the small, daily conversations that had connected me to home were simply gone

Every day, I found myself going through the motions, smiling when appropriate, drinking when i felt unheard. Everyone offering brief condolences before quickly changing the subject, as if grief were contagious. I began to understand that at twenty-two, I was an anomaly—most of my peers still had their parents, still took for granted the safety net of unconditional love and support that I had lost.

The loneliness was perhaps the hardest part. I had friends, of course, but they were all navigating their own early-twenties crises—bad breakups, job stress, the general anxiety of figuring out how to be an adult. They tried to be supportive, but I could see the discomfort in their eyes when I mentioned my mother, the way they seemed to hold their breath as if waiting for me to move on, to get back to normal. But what was normal now? How do you return to a version of yourself that no longer exists?

My relationship with my father deepened in unexpected ways. We talked more in the months after my mother's death, bonding over shared memories and the practical challenges of learning to live without the person who had been the emotional center of our family. But even this new closeness was tinged with sadness—we were like two survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to each other not out of choice but out of necessity.

It was around this time that I began to understand something that no one had told me about grief: it wasn't something you got over, like a cold or a broken bone. It was something you learned to carry, like a weight that gradually became part of your body's natural balance. The sharp, breathless pain of the early days softened into something more manageable but no less real—a constant awareness of absence, a mother-shaped hole in the fabric of my daily life.

I began to recognize the ways my mother lived on in me. I found myself using my mother's expressions, making decisions based on values my mother had instilled, reaching out to friends who were struggling because that's what my mother would have done. At twenty-two, I had been so focused on becoming my own person that I hadn't realized how much of my mother was already woven into who I was.

The grief would always be there, I knew. It would surprise me at unexpected moments—when I heard my mother's favorite song, when I achieved something I wanted to share, when I faced a challenge and wished I could ask for my mother's advice. But I had also learned that grief was love with nowhere to go, and that carrying it was a way of honoring the relationship that had shaped me most profoundly.

In quiet moments, I could almost hear my mother's voice, offering the kind of gentle wisdom that had guided me through childhood and adolescence: You are braver than you think. Trust your instincts. It's okay to change your mind. At twenty-three, I will still be figuring out who I am and who I want to become, but I am no longer doing it alone. I carry my mother's love with me, a compass that would guide me through whatever came next.

The weight of grief has become part of me now, as much a part of my identity as my brown eyes or my tendency to worry. But it is a weight that connected me to something larger than myself—to the love that had shaped me, to the woman who had believed in me even when I couldn't believe in myself, to the understanding that some losses are so profound they become transformative.

I am learning to live with the paradox of grief: that you can miss someone desperately while also feeling grateful for the time you had, that you can be heartbroken and hopeful simultaneously, that love doesn't end with death but finds new ways to express itself in the lives of those left behind. At twenty-two, I had lost my mother. At twenty-three, I will continue discovering that in some ways, I will never lose her at all.