People lose things all the time. Keys. Wallets. Phones. Usually, when we lose something, we start looking because somewhere in the back of our minds we expect to find it. But some things don’t work that way.
Have you ever lost the same thing three times? I have. It was my mother.
The first time happened slowly. I was a kid, so I didn’t have the words for what was happening or the maturity to understand it. I just knew home didn’t always feel the way home was supposed to feel, and being somebody’s child didn’t always feel the way being somebody’s child was supposed to feel.
Some of the things that happened when I was growing up left marks that lasted a lot longer than childhood did. I didn’t wake up one morning and think, I’ve lost my mother. It was more like losing something one small piece at a time until, years later, you finally understand how much had truly disappeared.
The second time wasn’t slow at all. I was an adult by then. I had a child of my own, so I understood what it meant to be a parent, and I knew there were things I could never imagine saying or doing to my child.
Then, in 1991, things were said and done that could never be undone. Lines were crossed that could never be uncrossed. Lines that most mothers would never cross to begin with. That was the day our relationship broke for good.
We spoke maybe five times over the next thirty-five years, and those conversations were brief at best. They felt more like formal check-ins than anything resembling a real relationship.
The third loss came on May 8, 2026. My brother called me in the middle of the night. I was asleep and didn’t answer. He called again the next day and told me Mom had died.
I knew I was supposed to feel something. Anything. Sadness, regret, remorse, maybe even guilt. Instead, I just felt numb. That was the hardest part. I knew what the moment was supposed to feel like. People lose their mothers and fall apart. They cry. They remember. They wish for one more conversation.
I didn’t. And I had to sit with that. That was a hard pill to swallow.
Thirty-five years is a long time for a relationship to be gone while the person is still alive. Birthdays pass. Holidays come and go. Children grow up. Grandchildren arrive. Whole chapters of our lives happen without the person who once occupied such an important place in them.
Maybe that’s why the call felt so strange. The news was sudden, but the loss itself wasn’t. The finality was new. The fact that there’d never be another chance, another conversation, another version of the story was new. But the distance had been there so long that it stopped feeling temporary years before.
I wasn’t happy she was gone. I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t celebrating anything. There just wasn’t a real relationship left to mourn anymore.
A few days later, my brother called again with news I never expected. My mother had left me an inheritance. Money was useful. I won’t pretend otherwise. I had already been planning my move to Costa Rica, and it gave me breathing room at a time when I was trying to figure out how to start a different life.
But the money wasn’t what I truly wanted from her. What I actually wanted was a mother.
My sister understood that feeling too. Neither of us had ever wanted a check to replace what had been missing from our lives for all those years.
There are things money can fix. Bills. Debt. A plane ticket. A new beginning. There are other things it can never repair.
It can’t go back and change a childhood. It can’t reopen a relationship that was destroyed decades earlier. It can’t replace all the conversations that never happened but should have, or all the years that passed without them.
A few weeks later, I went back for her interment. By then, I had already left the Postal Service. Costa Rica was no longer just a dream. My life was moving forward, even while I was standing there looking backward one last time.
I wasn’t suddenly overcome with grief at the cemetery. There was no movie ending, no last-minute reconciliation, no hidden message that made everything make sense. There was simply an ending.
I lost my mother slowly as a child, unexpectedly as an adult, and finally when she died. Three losses. Turns out, the third time isn’t always the charm.
We lose things every day. Most of those things eventually turn up, but some things, once they’re gone, never really come back.
Sometimes things are gone long before they’re finally lost.
