Earlier this year, my mother was skiing with my sister. 
She fell. 
She did not survive. 

I have stopped counting the days, weeks, months. 
Everyday is another day of denial. 
Every person I meet just another person who will never be able to truly understand why I am the way that I am without being able to meet her. 
Every sentence I write, doesn't feel real, doesn't feel possible. 

"My mother was in a fatal accident." 
As it has come to my attention, through painful conversations, that not everyone knows what that word means.
It means that she did not survive.

I refuse to use alternative wording.
I still can barely write that sentence.
I still cannot comprehend it. 
I have never used the D word. 

Not only because my brain doesn’t understand it but because it doesn’t want to try to. It wants to refuse.
I want to refuse this “reality.”
I do not want this to be my life.

I have a quote that my mom told me a couple years ago, and I have had it written down since then in a word document of quotes, because I found it so crude yet poignant. She said, “If you have a memorial service for me, I’ll come back and haunt you. They’re garbage. I don’t want people talking about me when I’m dead; they can talk about me when I’m alive.” 

I think she makes an excellent point.
Why do we wait to tell someone how much we love them; to tell them how much they mean to us; to recall all our favorite stories; our favorite moments. 
The answer could be simply because we don’t think it’s relevant.
It seems unnecessary.
Because one never ever thinks that this sort of thing will happen… to them.
We know that it happens to other people, but we think it will never happen to us. 

You are never prepared for that phone call.
You are never prepared for your life to be ripped apart.
It only take one second. 
That moment when you pick up the phone and your brother is crying so hard he can't speak. You hang up immediately and you want to live forever in that space, before you knew, before he called you back. 

Two days before the accident I went to Chicago to visit my grandpa. 
My mom had considered coming with but had decided not to. 
She has been skiing with the master ski team at Squaw for two years, and my sister was visiting her that weekend. 
The night before the accident my uncle told me that my mom had tried to call me. 
I hadn't received a missed call and she didn't leave a voicemail. 
I called her the next morning and told her that if the phone goes straight to voicemail, then I won't get a missed call, and I never would have know she had called if my uncle hadn't told me. I told her that my friend Anna was visiting me, and she was so excited that she offered to pay for our dinner that night, because she remembered how much fun we had had together the last time. We had gone to dinner at my favorite restaurant and then salsa dancing, and we planned to repeat it. 
My sister was still sleeping and they were going skiing that day. Just like everyday when you live in Squaw. I told her I loved her. 
My sister sent me pictures that morning as they walked to the mountain and as they started their day of skiing. 

I picked up Anna from the train station and we had lunch. 
She asked how my mom was, and we talked about how she seemed to have figured life out. She was working for herself, more successful than we hoped to be, and still somehow managing to live the dream- traveling and living in Squaw. 

Then you're drinking coffee with Anna and your grandpa and you get a phone call. 
You are sitting across from your 100 year old grandpa- your mom's dad- at a diner in Chicago. An Auschwitz survivor for four years who will demand you to tell him why you are crying hysterically. 
You are never prepared to spend the most defining moment of your entire life, the most horrible moment of your entire life, screaming at a diner. 
When your life changes that fast maybe you are never able to process it.  

We don’t need to go out of our way to tell people exactly why we love them, because we will always have the opportunity to. Until we don’t. Until you don’t.
Then what do we do? We get together and share the most incredible things about the most incredible people. When they are the only ones not there. We share all our love, all the best stories, and all of our sadness that we have lost the opportunity to say it to them. But for most people, we have not lost that opportunity yet. And we don’t know when we will. So why keep gambling.

In my case, I can’t even come up with the words now. What could I ever say.
I thought I had at least 25 more years to figure it out.
I thought I had another span of my lifetime left.

Days after the accident, I found myself completely disassociated from reality, sitting in my mom’s pickup truck outside of the Tahoe Mortuary.

What do you say.
When do you say it.

I had a stack of photos that I had printed out by a CVS attendant who appeared to be on drugs, from a machine that broke down half way through.

My hands shook and I cried incessantly as I wrapped these photos in white tissue paper. The pink. Then red. I then used a beautifully printed pink wrapping paper around all of that, and tied it with a red ribbon. I used these supplies which I had found in my mom’s craft box in the back of her Suburu. The supplies which were there because she had so intricately wrapped and decorated an incredible package for me the week before.

Write what I did that day.
I don’t want to write it, but also because it does not seem real.

These were the same supplies she had used to put together my incredibly amazing Valentine’s Day package this year, and every year before. As someone who absolutely hates Valentine’s Day, I often joked that I love it only because of my mom’s amazing gift boxes, and that she would forever be my only valentine. I always thought it was interesting how she chose this holiday. It was very unlike her, who doesn’t believe romance and is the most anti cheesy Hollywood commercialism person I know.

My parents got divorced when I was one, so perhaps we were always her Valentines. Everyday. I always assumed that my mom didn’t tell me how she felt- how much she loves me, how proud of me she is- because she felt it too much. That if she even tried to tell me how much she loved me, she wouldn’t be able to bear it; she would cry if she even started, and so she didn’t. And so I have become as well. I am not emotive because I am not used to it.

I cannot write a letter to my mom.
I can’t think about it and I can’t look at pictures or listen to voicemails or do anything but live in denial so that I can manage to keep living.
I don’t know what I would say or how I could ever articulate what I want to say.
A therapist asked me if I could write one line.

“Everything I am is because of you.”
Every opportunity I have had is because of my incredible mom.

I have hoped- as I have told her- to do even one half of the amazing things she has. Work for myself, be half a successful, make half the money, visit half the number of places, get up half as early in the morning, and drink half as much coffee.

The one thing I will change is my emotional communication.
I pride myself of maintaining the most open and healthy communication with people, but it never has to do with emotions.

Because I cannot bear to write a letter to the person who loves me more than any other human on this earth- than anyone else ever can or will- I will shamelessly tell the people I can, how much I love them and how much their love means to me.

I want them to know how amazing I think they are and exactly why.
Everyone deserves a love letter written for no reason, no other occasion, other than to tell the person that you love them.  And they deserve to hear it while you still have the opportunity to mail the letter to them, see their face, listen to their voice, and know how it makes them feel to read your letter.

Because life is too fucking scary not to tell the people we love how amazing they are.

I have no way of describing or labeling any of the feelings I have. They are too foreign, they are too strong, and language fails me. 
When I try and describe a feeling, it comes out as a metaphor. 

I want these letters to represent the love I cannot express and the love I am thankful for. To fill the emptiness I feel inside of me and to grow the love I feel from each person. I want the letters to represent all my love and all the love that my mom is. 

I am still writing,  and I have a long road ahead. 

Life is short. 
Eat dessert first. 

Click here to read the letters.