My mom died sometime last year. And it’s funny, I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened. Well, it’s not so much funny as it is strange. Because I wasn’t expecting her to die at all. And what you should also understand is that she’s not actually dead. Not physically at least. She’s still kicking up dust. Texting. Breathing. But she’s somehow also gone; or at least for me she is.

She’s dead in a way I’ve found excruciatingly hard to pinpoint and to process. It happened some time after my Dad died. He did actually die, by the way, in the physical way that all people eventually do. He was diagnosed with ALS which is recognized by most as one of the worst possible medical diagnoses someone can receive. It is not only a certain death sentence but a condemnation to live out your very limited last days in the most debilitating of ways. Losing your ability to do even the simplest tasks bit by bit. Every ounce of life and freedom wrung from your shell-shocked body until even the very last vestiges are robbed from you. I’m not just talking about the inability to take a walk in the park any longer, the loss of your favorite hobbies. What I mean is that you can’t eat because you can’t squeeze your esophagus into a swallow or move your jaw up and down, up and down to chew. You can’t breathe because you can’t expand your chest cavity to take in breath and your organs are too weak to absorb the air anyway. So you waste and you wither and you die. And your family watches as someone who used to be very much alive, full of vim and vigor, light and booming laughter, fades to nothing more than a heap of ashen flesh. I have written elsewhere about the depth of this grief, flayed it wide open again and again in order to relive it and to see it more clearly and in a wild, audacious hope, to understand it. And so here I will simply say it was a brutality I’ve never witnessed and hope to never bear again.

My mom, dad, and I made up a very close, very tightly woven triumvirate of people. I am an only child and was exceptionally close to the both of them. My relationship to each one very different, but special. I did not know, until one of us was removed, that my relationship to each of them was also dependent on the mathematical premise that our whole equation was a sum of three. One, plus one, plus one. That by our very nature, relating to my mother was deeply reliant on the existence of my father. And how could I have known? Because, as it stands to reason, I have never existed without them both before.

Those first few months were an exhausting task. Rebuilding whatever was left of my original nuclear family. And even though I was already a wife and mother, already held the keys to my own family’s doorstep, I felt achingly unmoored watching my childhood crumble to dust. The erasure of what I’d always known to be true and good. How lucky I’d been to feel that safe. The universe I’d been born into simply ceased to exist. And I told myself that while Dad was gone, there was still Mom. Mom, who would always be Mom. Mom, who for my thirty-seven years on this planet had been simply, Mom. There were lots of words for her of course; petite and loud, fiery and determined, opinionated and protective. But mostly, the word I knew for her, that encompassed all I knew her to be, was simply Mom. But yet when I went to find her, when I sought solace in her familiarity and comfort in her sameness, she was gone. It was like blinking and losing sight of the stars. Some odd bout of vertigo, horizons shifting to unrecognizable landscape. There was another Mom now. A Mom that had lost Dad. Somehow, I wasn’t expecting that.

In the span of that first year everything changed. Her likes and dislikes. Her preferences and proclivities. Even the lilt of her voice and the span of her interests. In that time she remarried. It happened so quickly and I’m still not able to decipher whether it was the result of a miraculous new journey or simply a desire to feel something close to normal. And now one new stranger has morphed into two. An unfamiliar version of my mother who I do not yet know, accompanied by her shiny, new husband. All of this newness, this lack of sameness, this nameless and faceless blank space that used to hold my notion of “parents” has brought on a dizzying carousel of emotion. The lead horse frozen in space on the ride for eternity is probably named anger. And I wonder, am I angry because for me, there is no parallel path? I know she cannot simply replace my Dad. It’s not a one for one equation, husband for husband. But she can at least, in some semblance of a way, redevelop a life with similarly structured companionship and love in a way that I cannot. I cannot recreate a relationship with my Dad. I can’t find anyone else who was there the day I was born, eagerly anticipating my arrival on the planet in that big way that only parents can. I cannot search around and find another grown man upon whom I’ve pinned my childhood grasp of what a human male who is good and kind and loving and strong should be. Who sees me through the lens of time. Who understands me and helps me laugh at my faults and proudly recognizes my strengths because he helped shape them. Because he recognizes himself in me and can talk directly to the parts of me that he knows so well because some of those parts of me ARE him. Scientifically and emotionally and experientially bound together in that mysterious way bloodlines and love-lines zip themselves up together. Who looks at my son as the unfurling of a generation that was always meant to be through him and through me and so it goes. And as such, it would seem, I’ve lost them both, my two parents. Where once stood my lifetime’s memories in tangible, huggable, human form, there is now only void.

Mom is different now, in a way that I can only understand at this moment in time as “gone.” Her hours and her mind, her heart and her cares wrapped up in fostering this new self that I’ve yet to fully know. My anger webbing outward from its central point like veins. Starting in one place and pooling in many. I watch, breath ragged, as she fawns over new family, new relationships. Finding ways to make them feel loved, seen and heard. I feel cast aside, discarded. I feel alone in ways I’ve never felt before. Questions rolling themselves out in my mind like a red carpet of resentment, welcoming me with a sneer. Did she know Dad would have stood for nothing less than pure devotion from the mother of his daughter? Now that he is gone, is her desire to invest in me evaporating? Did they wheel it away on the gurney with him? And perhaps worst of all, if I’m not enough now, was I ever?

Yet, miraculously, wrapped up in this pain, there is also a sliver of freedom. A glimmering slice of newly unlocked unburdening. Because to be the mythic “good daughter” I’d always envisioned was, frankly, cumbersome. It was heavy. It was second guessing my own choices. It was reacting emotionally to every ounce of disapproval, perceived or real. And not only reacting, but in many instances, often completely editing my behavior to fit the model. It was washing baseboards and planning elaborate meals and scouring sheets and towels with fragrance free detergents as is her preference. It was taking my child to church when I didn’t really want to and being highly conscientious of my weight; of the fit of my waistband and the girth of my thighs. It was modeling my life and my body and my ideals largely upon those of which she was sure to smile upon. It was valuing what she valued and assigning worth to her ideals and it was never identifying exactly what my own were because somehow along the way, that became entirely unimportant. It was exhausting and it was destructive and it “was” because it is something that no longer is. I was unsure of where she ended and where I began. But strangely enough, my father’s death suddenly illuminated those lines of demarcation and I began to slowly, sometimes painfully, sometimes defiantly, uncover the fault lines that would allow me to break off into some new sort of continent. One where we could see each another from a distance over the horizon, but the waves of our hearts and the sands of our time no longer shared a border.

When I realized by mother was no longer looking, I could get away with being myself. Losing my Dad, and the version of my Mom that I’d known all of this time, was in its own bleak way a gift. A gift I scooped up from the ashes and gave to myself. I gave myself back to me. I didn’t even know I’d been gone.

Lauren Dunn is a writer and part-time strategic communicator. After kicking off her career in the Washington, DC area, marrying and starting a family, she looked to Richmond, Va. for a change of pace and space to plant roots. A Virginia native, Lauren lives in Richmond with her husband and seven-year-old son. Lauren’s writing has been featured in Motherly, Her View from Home, and most recently, The Huffington Post. Lauren’s love of literature began as a child and continued through her education at Radford University. Keeping prolific journals from a young age, Lauren uses writing to process her experiences and environment, trying her best to make sense of this utterly nonsensical, sometimes confounding, but always entertaining life.