By Christina Fox 
I can’t remember her laugh anymore.
It’s been four years, and I still can’t say that out loud without feeling like I’ve done something wrong.
My mom died in October. The specific details of that week are burned into me in the strangest way: I remember the brand of crackers someone brought to the hospital waiting room, I remember my shoes were too tight. I remember a conversation about parking validation that felt absurd while it was happening and still does. But her laugh? The actual sound of it? I’ve lost the edges of it. It comes back to me blurry now, like trying to read something through fogged glass.
I didn’t expect that to be the thing that undid me.
The first year was bad in the ways you’d expect. Holidays. Her birthday. The random Tuesday when I picked up my phone to call her out of habit and then just…sat there holding it. I cried over a Subaru commercial once. Not even a sad one. I think I was just running on empty and something finally tipped me over.
But nobody tells you about year three or four. Nobody warns you that the grief shifts and gets sneakier. That one day you’ll be trying to remember the sound of her voice and it’ll come out slightly off in your head, like a cover version of a song you used to know by heart. And then you’ll spiral at 11 p.m. about whether you’re a bad daughter because you can’t hold onto it perfectly.
I found one voicemail. One. I’d deleted basically everything before I understood that I should be keeping it. This one survived somehow—47 seconds, her asking if I needed anything from the store. Her voice sounds a little distracted in it. She was probably doing three things at once. That was very her.
I’ve listened to it an embarrassing number of times.
Here’s the thing I keep circling back to, the thing I’m still not sure I fully believe but I’m trying to: forgetting isn’t the same as losing her. I know that sounds like something that belongs on a throw pillow. I’m sorry. I don’t mean it that way. I mean it in the specific, stubborn, unglamorous way I’ve had to keep telling it to myself on the bad nights.
She shows up in weird places. I say “oh for heaven’s sake” when I’m annoyed—her phrase, her exact inflection, living in my mouth now without my permission. I fix picture frames that are a quarter inch off. I make her meatloaf sometimes for no reason, following the index card in her handwriting, the one with the small grease stain in the corner that I will never, ever throw away.
I don’t know if that’s healing. It doesn’t feel like healing exactly. It feels more like…coexisting. Learning to carry something that doesn’t get lighter but that you get stronger for carrying, maybe. Or maybe you just get used to the weight. I’m not sure there’s a difference.
People talk about grief like it has an ending. I used to believe that. I was so ready to be done with it, to get to the other side where everything stopped hurting. I don’t think that place exists, or at least it’s not where I ended up. What I found instead was something smaller and more livable, a life where she’s gone and also still here, somehow, in the 47 seconds and the meatloaf and the crooked picture frames.
Some days that’s enough. Some days I’d trade all of it for one real phone call.
Both things are true. I’ve stopped trying to pick just one.
by Lauren Flake 
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