The Echo of Presence

On the opposite end from my father, my mother was the parent who raised me. She was the only parent I had, so when she passed, I felt the echo of her presence.

She passed away five years after my father. Because of what I learned from losing him, I tried to ask her the things I wanted to know while she was still here. Weirdly, though, her passing still impacted me in a lot of the same ways his did. There are still things I never knew about her. Questions I never got to ask. Things I'll never know. And those things haunt me, too, even more than anything I lived through.