It’s been sixteen days since my mother passed. Sixteen days. I keep counting, as if the number itself would help me grasp what forever actually means. But my body knows better than my brain does. My chest is heavy all the time, like I’m carrying a stone inside me.
Every evening after work, I used to call her. It wasn’t just a habit, it was my ritual. She’d pick up, sometimes already knowing it was me before looking at the screen. Half an hour, at least. Me telling her about office chaos, her giving opinions I didn’t always ask for, her recounting what she cooked that day, or who annoyed her. Sometimes she complained about my siblings, rotating the audience fairly, of course, me today, my sister tomorrow. It was our rhythm, our private frequency.
On my first day back at the office after her funeral, the rhythm betrayed me. I reached for my phone by instinct, like muscle memory. And then it hit, this hollow silence, the realization that the line is cut. Permanently. I froze. My chest tightened so hard I thought I might faint right there before I reach to my car.
I panicked and tried calling my husband, but he was busy in a meeting. So I called my brother instead. He said hello, and that was it. I broke. The sobs came ugly and raw, my words tumbling out half-broken, "Bang, gue kangen Mama..". I could hear my brother’s breathing on the other end, steady but heavy, like he was holding himself together just enough so one of us could fall apart.
People say grief gets easier. That time softens it. But I don’t see it. Not yet. Right now it’s not easier unfortunately, it just shapeshifts. I learn to compartmentalize, to shove the grief into a box so I can function and send emails, sit in meetings, even laugh at something stupid on the internet. But the box leaks. Sometimes in the middle of traffic, sometimes over coffee, sometimes when the radio turns Gala Bunga Matahari, sometimes when I reach for my phone without thinking. And then the wave hits, sudden and merciless.
One evening I told my husband that losing someone this close isn’t just painful, it’s life-altering. It changes how you see everything, both this dunya and the afterlife. It runs in parallel, the sharp ache of missing her in every little daily thing, and the strange comfort of knowing she lived well, that she was faithful in both hablum minannas and hablum minallah. She balanced both beautifully.
And I miss her fiercely. I miss how she always had my back, no matter how wrong or stubborn I was. I miss how she’d light up a room just by entering, immediately telling people what to do but somehow making them love her for it. I miss her fussing over me, even as an adult. I’m proud to be her daughter, and yet painfully aware I’m not even at her ujung kuku.
Her death also made me see my husband with a pair of new eyes (metaphorically, of course). For years, I was mostly difficult with him, cold, wrapped in nonchalance, pushing him away. But now, in her absence, I notice him in ways I never did. The quiet steadiness. The patience. The way he carries the weight I can’t. And now I know what it means to lose your first love, your person, your angel. That knowledge terrifies me if one day I had to lose him too.
That weekend we sat together on the porch, sipping hot tea. The late afternoon air was thick and slow. He asked softly, “How are you holding up now?”
I wanted to give him something clear, but I couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like a wave. Things keep popping up. I let them spill out now, and later, maybe, I’ll compartmentalize. But I am not sure either.”
And that’s when I realized: I don’t believe in those five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—as if grief is a tidy staircase you climb. No. It’s chaos. Messy. Non linear path. Unpredictable. Personal. For me, it’s all of them at once, sometimes none at all. Some mornings I wake up numb, other mornings I can’t stop crying in the bathroom before work.
Since June, I’d already been circling grief in my writing as if trying to rehearse it, the anticipatory grief they say. About Being Someone’s Daughter. About Holding Love and Loss at The Same Time. About seven seconds before the end. I thought I was practicing. And yet, I still carried hope that Mama would get better.
Because she was still my Mama. Eating Bakso Afung like a champion after the doctor drained two liters ascites from her stomach. Smiling as she told me, “Mama dulu sering ditraktir Om Iyan makan Bakso Afung.” Sneaking es jeruk behind my back though she had diabetes and told my Abang,"Nggak manis nih, Bang." Laughing when the nurse scolded her for eating a risol. “Enak, sus.” That stubborn joy carried me, and I let it.
Then August came, and she was gone.
The blanket over her body was the first rupture.
The thud of soil on her body was the second.
The third came the next morning, when I woke up and instinctively looked for her, as if death hadn’t yet reached my bones.
Since then, grief hasn’t been exactly a cinematic waves. It leaks through smaller places, on folding her clothes, stepping into a car and realizing I can’t call her anymore, catching myself saying, “Nanti tanya Mama dulu,” before remembering there’s no one left to ask.
And yet, I wasn’t passive. I did deliberate things and almost strategic I would say, like gathering tools for my future self. I washed her body, not because I had to, but because I wanted to hug her one last time, kiss her cheek, breathe her scent. I zipped up three of her clothes in plastic, to keep later when the ache sharpens. I slept in her bed. I wear her earrings, the ones she hadn’t taken off in forty years. I cling to these things not as objects, but as breadcrumbs, leading me back to her.
I hoard her—but not randomly. It’s intentional. A memory of candy slipped into my mouth like I was five. Lotion rubbed into my hands without asking. Her laugh in the dining table. Her palm reading where she told me I’d have three children. Our lunches together during our last time went to a mall, Soto Kudus after shopping at Matahari, where she picked three T-shirts for me. Remboelan, where she ordered Wedang Ronde, I ordered Es Jeruk Kiamboy for the first time and I liked it, and we shared bakwan jagung. There’s even a video from that day. All of these are now relics, holy fragments, proof that she was here.
So I keep rewinding. I scroll through old WhatsApp chats with her, zooming in on her last messages as if there’s some hidden clue. I reread my journal entries from earlier this year, searching for patterns. I trace the steep decline of her health in those final weeks, combing through every detail as if I could’ve done something differently.
And maybe, if I’m honest, I’ve been searching for signs that her time was nearly over. As if somewhere, in her words or her silence, she was telling me goodbye. But no. Those “signs” I thought I saw later they weren’t real. They were just my brain scrambling, desperate to build order out of something unbearable. Because otherwise, it’s just chaos, and chaos is harder to survive.
Earlier this year, my therapist asked me about childhood and I couldn’t remember. Mama filled it in: “Dari sebelum bisa ngomong, kamu tuh maunya main sendiri, mama diusir, disuruh pergi.” She remembered the parts of me I had erased. Who does that now? Who keeps the archive when the archivist is gone?
So here I am, toggling between scientist and daughter. Cataloguing grief like evidence, then breaking when the memory is too sharp. Between faith in her stored prayers and the ache of her absence. Between studying and sobbing.
For me, grief feels like waves slamming into rock. Relentless. Violent. No pause, no mercy.
And if it feels this crushing at 32, I can’t stop thinking about the ones who lost their mothers much earlier. Teenagers. Children. Babies who will never know their mother’s voice, her laugh, the smell of her cooking, the way she fussed over a second plate of rice.
That thought humbles me. Breaks me again. Because grief is already unbearable when you’ve had decades of love to hold on to. What does it look like when you barely had time at all? Maybe that’s the cruelest thing about loss—it reshapes you, no matter when it happens. Some of us carry a lifetime of memories like a heavy book. Others grow up with fragments, with the sound in the back of their mind, with stories told by someone else.
Either way, we keep walking. With the cliff carved into us. With the weight that doesn’t go away.
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