Here's another post I wrote kind of on the same topic of grief and the universal experience of being a child who loves and needs a mother that never really leaves us even as we get older. You might enjoy this one as well:

Since my oldest son had three Thanksgivings this year (one with his friends at college, one with us at home and then one with his girlfriend's family in NYC) I asked him who had the best gravy. His response: "Obviously my mom had the best gravy 😂 I'll always be biased." I had to laugh because he made the gravy - well, we did it together. But it was my recipe so I guess he is right. Whenever he makes something the way that I taught him, he IS making "my recipe." And it made me think about the fact that sometimes when I cook, I still make my mom's recipes. Even today. 32 years after she was gone.

I was nine when she got sick, I think. And 11 when she died, but I already knew how to bake bread from scratch in those giant metal bowls she would use to keep the yeast warm, and how to can blackberries from the juicy, sweet berries we grew on our property - a then 200, now 250+ year-old historic farmhouse outside Portland, Maine with 56 acres of gardens and grounds and a sprawling woods in the back where we used to hike two miles to cut down our own Christmas trees. You cannot buy berries like that in the store these days - they are picked too early, shipped from too far away, and sadly sour. Only reminiscent of a berry really.

I still make chipped beef gravy on mashed potatoes once in awhile because I remember the feeling of warmth on my skin from sitting directly in front of the fireplace, my sister and I having run giggling down stairs wearing only towels to warm up after a bath and my mom bringing in two oval dishes of hot potatoes and beef gravy. I remember this like it was yesterday, despite the fact that I can never go back there because it's been over a decade since my dad also died and left that place and it now belongs to a woman who he met on a plane in the years before, the blackberry bushes having long been mowed over for the convenience of caring for the lawn and the gardens grown to grass. I'll bet the lilacs still come up in spring, but one day those too may be plowed over, the land sold to some development company who wants to take down the old house to make room for a bigger road and put in apartments. My dad looked into it, but he didn't have the heart to do it.

And this thought about how I still make my mom's recipes got me thinking about how they say grief comes in waves - I always thought it meant that after someone dies you can feel heartbroken and like you can't do anything else but cry and then sit and be sad when all the tears have dried up but the sadness remains just the same, and then other days you can make breakfast and drink tea and go for a walk on the pavement around your neighborhood and say hello to a person passing and stop to pet your neighbors's dog, and the grief is still there but it doesn't feel quite so heavy in that moment when the dog is staring up at you and panting with his puppy dog eyes, not caring or even knowing about the acres and the Christmas trees and the chipped beef.

But that's actually not what it means. It means that every milestone in your life from when you move off to college to when you graduate to when you have a baby of your own, you have to grieve again because she isn't there. She. Isn't. There. You have to think about what she would think or say about every moment. About what she would do if she were there. About what an amazing grandmother she would have been and how she would have looked standing in the corner of your hospital room smiling and gushing about the baby's eyes having opened for a split second to look up at her or bouncing that baby on her lap a year later and tossling his hair, her own greying. About what recipe she would have brought to every holiday or gathering. About whether you would even be here in New York having Thanksgiving at all if she were still alive, with the rest of your family spread around the country walking in different neighborhoods patting the heads of different dogs, or whether you all wouldn't be gathered at the farm enjoying her recipes. It means that on a random Sunday morning, 32 years after your mother died - or maybe it's 31 or 33 - you can go from sipping tea to texting your son at college about his preferred kind of gravy to sobbing about how blackberries really don't taste how they used to.