August 17th, again. The anniversary of the day my mother took her last inhale and never again exhaled.

After hours with her, I’d stepped out of the room only minutes before to eat dinner, anticipating a long night ahead because her nurse said she’d be gone by midnight. I never took a bite of the beautiful salad my then boyfriend, Bob, prepared for me. He promised he’d come get me if anything changed.

About to put the fork in my mouth, I stopped when I saw him. “Did something happen?”

“Come with me,” he said.

I followed him down the hall to her room. As we turned to enter, he stopped at the doorway, faced me, and said, “She’s gone.”

“Why didn’t you come get me?”

“There wasn’t time. She inhaled and then never exhaled.”

I went to her side. The frothing rasping movement of her chest and the nodding to someone unseen, gone. My mother lay there. The woman who carried me in her body, the woman who taught me everything, who nurtured me through every childhood illness, who loved me throughout my life no matter what I said or did, the last person I considered family, had now left me alone to figure out the world, figure out how to grieve and heal without her.

She died 16 years ago and I miss her every single day. Would I go back to those last days if it meant I got to see her again? I would not. Those days were hell. And the truth is, our relationship has improved since she died. Without our personalities to get in the way, I can see and understand this woman I thought I knew so well, in ways I hadn’t while she was alive.

My mother lives in me. Although she had reddish skin and blue eyes, and my skin is olive and my eyes brown, I see her when I look in the mirror. Sometimes my hand moves in a certain way and I know it’s her. And those times when her words come out of my mouth saying things I vowed I would never speak, are different now. Because she’s dead, instead of being annoyed, I laugh and say, “Hi, Mom.”

Love doesn’t die and my love for my mother has been the one constant of my life. Did I always like her? No. But I haven’t always liked myself either, and yet I’m still here.

My mother taught me to love books and be curious, two of the most profound wonderful gifts of my life. My mother taught me to be tough through hard times and to move forward without self-pity.

My mother did not teach me how to cry. That’s something I knew as a child and then relearned as an adult. My mother was stoic and even told me when I was a little girl that, “when you grow up, your tears dry up.” Of course, that wasn’t true, but she believed it and I guess for her that was the truth because I never saw her cry. Not even after my dad died, leaving her widowed a second time at 47. I always imagined she went into her room and cried alone. Many decades later, when she lived with me and was nearing her own death, she told me that she never cried.

I wish she had cried and known the power of tears. I believe her life would have been fuller had she allowed herself to experience the full array of emotions available to us. I wish she had because tears contain chemicals that heal us when we cry. I wish she had because maybe she would have allowed love into her life and not spent most of her life alone.

I think she eventually understood this, an awareness arriving too late to do anything different. She was in bed, her death not too far off, and I was cutting her toe nails, when she suddenly exclaimed, “Goddamn you!” Startled, I dropped her foot, certain I’d accidentally hurt her. Then she repeated, “Goddamn you for dying young!” She was looking up and across the room at a photograph taken of her and my father not too long before he died. A photo of them in each other’s arms, dancing, smiling, and in love.

She turned her attention to me. “I was criticized when I married your father so soon after Jimmy died, but wasn’t that better than this?” I knew “this” meant all these decades she’d spent without the love of a man.

She always had my love, but that’s not the same.

She still has my love and always will.

I have never gotten over her loss, nor do I want to. She wasn’t a cold or the flu. She was my mother, and our relationship and love are forever. Grief doesn’t have a shelf life.

Mom died 16 years ago today, and I will tell you that I miss her every single day, and certainly more profoundly as I acknowledge another year since she died.

Her name was Ruth.