You are nine months old now. You have officially lived outside of my body, just as long as you were inside of it.

There’s something about this nine month mark. I felt it with your sister too. There’s an independence that comes with it, an attachment that is less to me, and more to the world around you. You are here and you are part of it all, and this is something you have begun to grasp.

I already can’t quite remember a time when you weren’t part of my life. I mean, of course I can remember all those 33 years before you arrived, but what I mean is that I can’t imagine not knowing you. I can’t imagine not being your mama, not being a guide for your sweet little soul.

And Juliette? You are sweet. So incredibly sweet. You are a happy little thing. You laugh all the time, even when you’re uncomfortable. You just laugh. You are watchful and you are quick to smile. I’ve seen you look around a room, just waiting to catch someone’s eye so that the moment you do, you can give them one of your quiet little smiles.

Life has been complicated at home lately, your dad and I trying hard to figure out our careers and finances and the future. Things seem uncertain much of the time and sometimes the stress of it all makes me feel like I can’t breathe. But then I look at you and your sister and I find myself able to take another breath.

We could be anywhere, on an airplane, in our living room, in the car in the morning on the way to take Vera to school, and the two of you are looking at each other. Vera is making some weird face, with an even weirder noise to go along with it, and your eyes are on hers, riveted by whatever she is doing, a small smile edging across your lips. And I realize that no matter how sticky or stressful life may be, as long as it’s not that way for you or Vera, then everything will be okay.

That’s what parents do, I suppose. They shield us from the worries of the world, for as long as they can. And that’s why we, as adults, often bemoan how hard it is to be a grown-up. And it is hard. Oh, how I wish I could go back to being a kid, or even a teenager, when my biggest worries were what to wear to school, what boy to like, and which quiz not to study for. I mean, of course it all felt bigger than that at the time, but looking back? Those seem like simple things.

Life is big, my sweet girl. It’s bigger and longer and messier and more wonderful than you or I even really know. But here’s the thing. It’s also what you want it to be. Life is the story you tell yourself it is. It’s the dream you choose to believe is real. It’s the path you thought you shouldn’t take, but then did. It’s the heart, so full of love you’re blinded by it.

It’s you.

And me.

And everything that is to come.

Love,

Mom

Dear Mom,

You have been gone for 16 years. Almost half of my life. All morning I’ve been trying to imagine what you would think of me now.

I’m thirty-four years old. I live in California. I’m married with two little girls. I’m a writer, and a therapist. I keep wondering if these are the things you imagined for me. If you ever saw into my future, if you ever had glimpses of who I would become. I wonder if you ever imagined me as a mother, you as a grandmother.

I don’t know. But I know that you would be happy if you could see me now. I think you would be proud of me. I know you would adore your granddaughters. Their names are Veronica and Juliette.

Veronica is three and a half. She is blond and blue-eyed like you. And she is funny and serious, fiery and sensitive, imaginative and vulnerable. She reminds me of you a lot. She is kind of brave and beautiful in this totally unaware way. She’s also maddening in her determination to do things her way. A trait of most three year olds, sure, but you were like that too. Once you got something in your head it was impossible for you to let it go.

Juliette is only seven months old but I feel like I know her personality already. She’s so different than her sister. She’s sweet and happy and utterly content as long as she’s riding around with one of us. Whereas Vera seems to have a constant furrowed brow, Jules breaks into a smile at the drop of a hat. She has this funny habit of chuckling all the time, even when she’s upset.

I can’t believe you’re not here to know them. That you’re not here to see me as a mother.

I think about this all the time in terms of the girls. How all I want in this lifetime is to see them into adulthood. I want to be there for all the things you weren’t there for with me. I want to see them graduate college and go through their twenties. I want to hold their hands through painful breakups and watch them try on wedding dresses. I want to see their passions develop, their careers unfold. I want to get a call when they’re going into labor with their own children. And I want simple things too, like when they’re sad and confused and lonely and they just need their mother.

There’s been so many times in the last 16 years when I’ve needed you, when I’ve turned and turned and turned in circles trying to find you, trying to find anything to hold onto. In doing so I’ve become my own woman.

I once read that a girl doesn’t become a woman until she loses her mother and I know that has been true for me. I’ve had to learn to mother myself, even when I desperately didn’t want to. I haven’t always done a very good job, but I’ve gotten this far.

I think a lot about who I would be if I still had you. I think about trips we could have taken together. I think about all the times I’ve made terrible decisions because you weren’t there to guide me, and I wonder where I would be now instead. I wish I could have had you to teach me how to cook, to give me fashion advice, to help me decorate my home. I look around at those things, at what I’m wearing or how my house is arranged – trivial things, I know – but suddenly it all looks pathetic to me. My little attempts at these things, and how much better it would all be if you were here. In those moments I see myself as a little girl, flailing without you.

But motherhood is the thing I most wish you were here to see me through. I have so many questions and so many moments I wish I could share with you. You were a great mother. You were so generous, so funny, so creative and so, so weird and impulsive. You brought magic and make-believe and pure joy and excitement into my life. Even when I was being serious, which I often was, you knew how to open me up, how to make me let go, how to make me believe, even when I was resisting the most. You were charming and utterly impossible to turn down.

Most of all, you were always there. I can’t think of one time when I needed you or called for you and you weren’t there. Sick days and sad days, loneliness and doubt, throughout all of those you never failed to wrap your arms around me as tight as you could, and tell me how much you loved me.

And all these years later, sixteen long years later, I can still feel that love. I really can.

So I guess what I hope for most is that I can give that same gift to my girls, that the love I have for them will be so strong and so true that it will transcend time and space, life and death.

For that is what you gave to me.

Love your only daughter,

Claire

This morning, like a lot of mornings over the last month, I thought about the parents of the Newtown. About how they once said goodbye to their children each morning with ease and confidence, and how that has forever changed. I thought about how it’s been 33 days since those children were killed and how so many of us have gone back to our regular lives, occupied by other news stories, new years resolutions, bills, travel plans. But while the rest of us are moving on, many of those parents in Connecticut are perhaps just now entering into the real throes of their grief.

The first year of grieving someone you love is like no other. There are whole swaths of denial, moments and days when it just doesn’t seem real. And then worse, it does start to feel real and then there are whole moments and days when the pain is almost unbearable. I can recall many times in my life when I’ve stood in empty rooms of houses where someone I loved once lived and how I sank to the floor, utterly consumed by what felt like endless waves of grief and torment over their absence.

One of the most common questions I’m asked, both as a therapist and as someone who writes about grief, is how long it lasts. How long will I grieve? Does it ever end?

My answer is always the same: It’s different for everyone. But I can tell you that grief almost always lasts longer than the people around you expect it to. Sometimes people are surprised when I tell them that grief can last years. Others are relieved to hear this, because they already know it to be true.

I do believe that there can be an end to active grieving. I think there comes a time when the real, raw pain of grief ends, when you no longer think about that person’s absence first thing in the morning. There comes a time when you move forward in life without thinking about how they’re not beside you while you do it. Eventually the regret and remorse, the unanswered questions and all the what-ifs surrounding the loss, start to soften. After a while the sad memories of the end are replaced by better ones from the beginning. Eventually enough time  passes and it becomes easier to talk about them without crying, easier to remember them without wanting to sink to your knees.

But just because grief has an end doesn’t mean your love for that person does too. I think we always miss the people we lose, that we never stop wishing they were still here with us. It’s just that we learn to live with their absence, we learn to live our lives without them, as impossible as that can often seem in the beginning.

I’ll don’t think I’ll ever stop wishing my mother and father were still around to see my girls, to meet my husband, and to see how I’ve grown into adulthood. But I can move forward through my life now without breaking down over their absence. There was a time when each new thing I accomplished — graduating college, getting a great job, publishing an article or entering into a new relationship — was bittersweet in their absence. But that is no longer true for me. The pain of it all is gone. In its place is a kind of weathering, not just the kind that comes with age, but one that comes with deep sorrow and yearning, a particular kind of crinkle around my eyes, or in the lines around my mouth. If you look hard enough you can see it in all of us who have mourned, how we have given ourselves over to time because we have had to, because its the only thing that brings us both closer to and farther away from the people we love.

So however long it takes us to find that place, however long it takes us to put one foot in front of the other again, however long it takes to smile, to love life again, is simply how long it takes. There is no right answer. Think about how much you love your most cherished people. While that love may have appeared instantaneously in some cases, over time it grew and grew until it was so big that there became no separation too vast, no amount of time too great, in order to reverse it.

We grieve until we don’t anymore, but we love forever.