Tomorrow it is 3 months since I lost my mum. A whole quarter of a year without her. It feels like a lifetime. Far too long and truth be told it terrifies me how long I still have to survive without her for. 

Tomorrow is also a big day for another reason as it is the day we scatter her ashes. It's taken us a while to finalise where we wanted to do it as we wanted it to be right. She deserves that. Somewhere she would have been happy. Somewhere we are happy to go to remember her. The place we have chosen is perfect. It's where she took us as children, where we made so many happy memories. It's where she went with her grandchildren and it's a place she was always happy in. The perfect place which could only be made better by her actually being there with us. I can't tell you how much I wish she was. That thought comes into my head frequently...... "If Mum were still alive we'd be......."

It was inferred to me today by someone that after tomorrow I can start to "get over it". The death of my mother that is. Those words were actually uttered. Get over it because this is the last "big thing" I have to get through. I was shocked and upset at first. How could anyone say that? Do they think I am milking it? Then I was angry. How dare they? Now I have had a little time to reflect and I am envious. Envious of someone who is able to be so ignorant of the vastness of grief that they think I can ever get over it. Envious of someone being so naive as to think that this is the last big thing. I wish I was that clueless. 

I will never get over this. I believe I will learn to live with it one day. But not now. Not only 3 months in. I'm still learning to accept it has happened, never mind learning to live with it. And only someone who has not experience this kind of grief would be stupid enough (is that too harsh?) to think it is something to "get over". Perhaps I should be more forgiving of this person and recognise the fact that sometimes people just don't know what to say and accidentally say the wrong thing. But telling me I can now start to get over it is possible the worst thing anyone could say to me. 

You see, I may be scattering Mum's ashes and it may be a really hard "big thing" I have to get through tomorrow but it certainly isn't the last thing I have to get through. There are so many big things coming. Birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, house moves, new schools. So many things to come which I will have to brace myself for. And what I am coming to realise is that the big things might not be the hardest things to face after all because I can do just that. I can brace myself for them. 

In fact it is the little thing that are the hardest. Watching the proud Grandma's at Poppy's ballet show on Saturday and remembering that Mum was going to watch it with me because she loved watching Poppy dance and she wasn't there. Listening to a song on a film sound track last night which reminded me of her funeral song and the look on my Dad's face when he first told me what songs he'd picked. Finding out which teacher Poppy was getting when she starts school in September and not being able to ring her. They are the worst things. Because they come from nowhere, completely unexpectedly and they hit me in the face. So hard that it floors me. So hard that I can go from fine to a hysterical heap on the floor in seconds because the pain of not having her is so much more than something I can just "get over."

So tomorrow we will scatter her in a place she loved and in a place of happy memories. And we will survive another day without her. Because we have no choice, this is our life now. It is not something we have to get over but something we have to live with. Thankful that we lost her the year in which the sun shone so brightly and that we could hide our tears behind a well-placed pair of sunglasses. x