Ten years ago today, my mother died. My sister and I still talk about her all the time because life keeps handing us new reasons to wonder what she’d think, or what she’d say in moments we’re only now old enough to ask about. Almost every one of those conversations ends the same way: we’re crying, and then we’re laughing, sometimes in the same breath. It’s become one of the most reliably therapeutic things either of us does.
A decade is a strange unit of time to measure loss by. It’s long enough that people expect you to have moved on. It’s short enough that some mornings still feel like the first one.
When someone we know loses someone they love, most of us reach for the same words: “it gets easier with time.” Grief comes in waves, so we say to expect the “ebbs and flows.” Those phrases aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re just describing grief a bit like the weather: something that happens to us, that we endure, that we wait out. Anyone who has grieved knows there are seasons of it that simply have to be survived.
But ten years in, I think my sister and I are experiencing a different process. We didn’t wait for our grief to grow into something smaller. We metabolized it.
Metabolism is a biological process, and it’s a useful visual to borrow, because it describes exactly what grief eventually asks of us: to take something in, break it down, and let it become part of the structure of who we are. Metabolizing grief transforms it into memories, feelings, and moments that the body can actually use to keep us moving forward. That’s what ten years of talking, crying, and laughing about our mom has done. Her loss hasn’t shrunk. It’s been absorbed into how my sister and I show up for each other, into the questions we ask, into the two women we’ve become because we had her and then had to learn how to go on without her.
This is why we keep talking, even now, even about the same person, even ten years later. Not because we’re stuck, and not because we haven’t healed. Because metabolizing isn’t a single event; it’s ongoing. Every new phase of our own lives surfaces a question we hadn’t thought to ask before: Did she ever feel this way? What do I understand about her now that I couldn’t have understood at twenty-five, or thirty-five? Grief that’s been metabolized doesn’t close the subject. It keeps the person alive inside the conversation.
If you’re supporting someone early in loss, “it gets easier” isn’t a lie, but it isn’t the whole truth either. The fuller truth is that the heaviness doesn’t just fade on its own; it gets worked through, turned over, spoken aloud, cried about and laughed about, sometimes in the very same conversation, until one day you notice you’re carrying it differently.
Ten years later, our mom is not a wound we manage. She’s integrated, and still, somehow, giving us the energy to keep going.