I think I’m in a very odd headspace today.

I had a great time in Nevada this past weekend—good friends, familiar faces, and that rare feeling of being around “my people.” There’s something grounding about being surrounded by folks who share the same passions. Events like that strip away a lot of the background noise of everyday life and let you simply exist in the moment.

I’m not that crazy (stop laughing).

But weekends like that tend to force reflection, whether I’m prepared for it or not. And these days, reflection has a way of slipping too easily into regret—something I’m actively trying to unlearn.

One of the biggest realizations that hit me over the past few days is how many small, seemingly insignificant things have become tangled up in my grieving process. I’ve started to think that nearly everything from the last few years belongs in the category of grief—grief for the past, for the person I used to be, for the life I thought I was heading toward.

The Beginning of the End

I’ve said before that I think the beginning of the end of my marriage started on Thanksgiving of 2017. There was a domestic violence incident that day, and things were never right afterward. It’s water under the bridge now—it happened, it’s in the past, and it can’t be undone.

But another truth lived beneath all that: I had fallen in love with someone I could never be with. Right person, impossibly wrong time. I loved them for years, quietly, privately, without expectation. And to be clear—I don’t want anything more than the friendship that exists now. I’m not looking for relationships, and I doubt I ever will again. Twenty-seven years was enough. More than enough.

Maybe I’m sentencing myself to loneliness.

Or maybe I’m finally realizing that there’s peace in choosing my own company. I like people, but lately I’ve found that people can also be a barrier to my own enjoyment of life.

What I Miss Most

And somewhere in all of that reflection, I found myself missing my mom a lot more than usual.

We take our parents for granted—everyone says that, but no one feels the weight of it until it’s too late. I did take her for granted, but I also knew for most of my life how important she was to me. She raised my sister and me almost entirely on her own, in a time when women weren’t given much room to breathe without a husband’s “approval.” She taught us how to cook, how to survive, how to take care of ourselves. That self-sufficiency is one of the main reasons I’ve been able to keep going now.

The last couple of days have felt heavy with her absence.

I don’t know what happens after we die. Heaven, hell, purgatory, reincarnation, or nothing at all—I have no answers. But I do believe there’s something beyond physical life. And I know this: whatever it is, it has nothing to do with what organized religion tries to sell you.

My sister and I both feel, in our own ways, that Mom still watches over us. Not in some weird, saccharine Hallmark-movie way—just a quiet, persistent feeling of being looked after. A kind of maternal gravity that still pulls at us.

The Heart That Falls

When Mom was cremated, a small portion of her ashes were placed in an acrylic heart. It sits on a lit pedestal in my home, glowing softly. I’ve never turned the light off.

And here’s the strange part—the “creepy weird,” I guess:

In certain moments, that heart will fall off the pedestal. No reason. No bump, no breeze, no vibration. It just falls.

My sister has had the same experience with hers. And we’ve both come to the same conclusion: it’s her way of giving us a nudge. A reminder that she’s still around in whatever way she can be.

It’s comforting, honestly. Even if it’s also unnerving to think she might have had a front-row seat to every dumb thing I’ve done.

What I Regret Most

If I have one true regret—and I know I’m supposed to stop trying to live in regret—it’s that I let him isolate me from her in those last years. I wasn’t around as much as she deserved. And even though she still loved me and still wanted me in her life, I can’t shake the guilt of allowing that distance.

But in the end, she saved me one last time.

Her final illness forced me to confront my substance use. The fact that I physically couldn’t travel to her as her health declined became the catalyst for my sobriety. Even as she was dying, she was still protecting me, even if she never knew it.

She didn’t know about the addiction. But I can almost hear her voice:

“Okay, you screwed up. How are we going to fix it?”

And maybe that’s the lesson at the center of everything—love doesn’t stop just because a body does.

I miss her every day. When the heart falls, or even when I simply walk by and look at it, I remember that I had a damn good mother. Better than I ever realized at the time. And I hope she knew—really knew—how much I loved her, how much I appreciated her, and how grateful I am that she continues to watch over me, in whatever way she can.

That’s why I talk about my dog and my mom so much.

They were the two beings who loved me without conditions.

And that’s why I know they’ll always be watching over me.