“What Broke Your Heart Completely?” 30 Stories (10/30)

My mom died when I was a senior in high school. It all seemed very surreal, and like she had never actually left, since everything of hers was still in the house, where she had left it.

At her funeral, after hearing my brother and sister speak, make morbid jokes (as our family tends to do) and just generally do the normal funeral stuff, it finally hit me. It had been several days since she had passed, but it just hit me all at once like a bag of bricks that I would never hear her voice again. She would never be there to nag me when I needed to take out the trash, clean my room, do my homework, or the million other things that she had to constantly remind me to do.

That was the moment that I broke down and started sobbing. I hadn’t shed a tear up until that point–maybe it was shock, I don’t know. In that moment I realized that I now lived in a different world, one where I would have to finish growing up without the aid of my mother.