When Grief Takes More Than One Parent

When my father passed away in July, I thought I was grieving one loss.

I didn’t expect to lose my mother too.

She adopted me when I was three years old.
She is the woman I called Mom for most of my life. The woman who tucked me in.
The woman who showed up at school events.
The woman who became my family.

And yet, somewhere between grief and silence, I feel like I’ve been erased.

I know I’m not her biological daughter.
I’ve always known that.
But I never believed it meant I was temporary.

I don’t call often. I never have.
I’m not the kind of person who talks on the phone for hours.
But love isn’t measured in phone minutes.

What hurts most isn’t just that she’s distant from me.

It’s that she’s distant from my children.

Her grandchildren.
Her great-grandchild she may never meet.

I watch her drive past New Hampshire to Maine to help my sisters, and I try not to let that break me.

Maybe I was always the black sheep.
Maybe I was the harder one.
The emotional one.
The independent one.
The one who didn’t fit neatly into expectations.

But I was never ungrateful.
I was never unloving.
And I was never less of a daughter.

Losing a parent to death is one kind of grief.

Losing one who is still alive…
That’s a different kind of ache.

I’m learning that sometimes the people who raised you
don’t know how to walk with you into who you’ve become.

And that doesn’t make you unworthy.
It just makes the truth hard.

I don’t know what the future holds.
I don’t know if this silence will last forever.

But I do know this:

I am still a daughter.
I am still worthy of love.
And my children will never question whether they belong.