Remembering my mother, 11 years after her death

Death has a way of warping time. While 11 years doesn’t feel that long to me, it does seem like my mother died in a different era. For me, her death was the end of normal times, and the decade that has followed has ushered in a world I barely recognize.

As those who have experienced loss of a loved one knows, grief is not linear. It moves in unpredictable waves. Another way of describing it is “growing around grief.”

My mother doesn’t visit me that often in dreams but one way I feel her presence is each year, around the time of the anniversary of her death, the butterfly bush I planted in her honor begins to bloom.