Year Twelve - What Remains

Twelve years.

I thought I would miss her the same way forever. The acute, breathtaking absence of the first year. But grief isn’t a straight line. It changes shape.

She doesn’t come to me in longing anymore. She’s in Lila’s face when she sleeps, in the certainty that the two of them would have been conspirators in every shopping mall from here to Mumbai.

I don’t miss her the way I used to.
I miss what could have been.

She had her forties and most of her fifties. What she didn’t get were her sixties and seventies. The slower decades, where I imagine she might have finally put herself first.

She didn’t know how to stop. Even when she was exhausted, she kept going. We fought about that. I wish we had more time to repair what those fights left behind.

Now it’s grandmothers in grocery stores that undo me. The unhurried way they love. That’s the grief now. Not her absence from my past, but from this life. From what was supposed to come next.

The last twelve months were about asking what it means to stop an ancestral pattern. To stop being burdened and start being blessed.

I was brought back to an old darkness. Not new, not unfamiliar. Just something I thought I had outrun.

And then I did what she never let herself do.

I stopped.
I asked for help.
I stepped away from the life I had been maintaining and found my way back to myself.

Depression and anxiety live in my body the way they lived in hers. Unnamed. Unexamined. She didn’t get to put it down.

I am putting mine down. Using the tools I’ve gained to break patterns and shape a life that can hold the next five decades.

I’ve been drawn to kintsugi. Broken pottery repaired with gold. The cracks aren’t hidden. They become the most beautiful part.

This year, I realized I was holding the pieces. Not just my own, but the fragments of us. What we lost. What fractured. What never had the chance to become.

I had been waiting for something to feel whole again. Instead, I began to shape it.

There isn’t a return. Only a new form needs to be made.

I became the potter.

Not to erase the breaks, but to reimagine them. To recreate what I have now. To bring together what still remains and decide, with care, what it can become.

My parents brought people together through ritual, preparation, gathering, and the devotion embedded in each. We do it differently now, without the form but with the same instinct. Food, long conversations, the kind of laughter that loosens something. People leave more of themselves than when they arrived.

The tradition didn’t break. It translated.

For a long time, I measured myself against an inheritance I couldn’t fully replicate. The language. The rituals. The unbroken thread I imagined was supposed to pass from my mother to me to Lila, intact, recognizable, continuous.

Lila doesn’t speak Gujarati. She prefers Christmas to Diwali. Ballet to Bharatnatyam. She is, in almost every visible way, not what I pictured when I pictured passing something down.

But I think I confused transmission with transformation. 

My mother didn’t hand me something finished. She handed me a way of moving through the world. I see it now in the way I let Lila go toward a life I can’t fully picture, and feel, underneath the worry, something that looks like trust.

Connection isn’t language, food, or geography. Its presence. It’s leaving someone more themselves than when you arrived.

She is not absent from any of this.

She’s in my dad’s laugh.
In Thomas’s quiet humor.
In Lila’s becoming.
In every relationship, I’ve had the courage to repair or release.

The cracks are still there.
So is she.

We have walked through so many thresholds. She couldn’t follow me through all of them. But what she made in me could.

Love is the making and remaking, over and over, of something built to hold.

Here’s to what remains. Here’s to what’s still ahead.

Twelve years later, I finally understand it. 

Here’s to what remains.

Here’s to what’s still ahead.