May, June, and July were a roller coaster. Dealing with my mother’s illness and death, and my continuing neck and shoulder pain, while frantically trying to wrap up all the loose ends at my job before starting my one-year research and study leave, left me feeling overextended, overwhelmed, and utterly exhausted.
I still have bad days, days where I sleep for 16 hours, and days where all I seem to be able to do is listen to music and cry, but they are getting fewer and further between. And, in between the bad days, I am also having some great days. I just need to take things one day at a time, one step at a time.
Grief is not linear; it comes in waves. A song will bring back a memory, and the memory might bring back more tears. The afghan that my mother crocheted, that used to be in her bedroom, now adorns my sofa. Her cookbook now sits on my microwave. My brother is bringing me three framed needlepoint canvases she stitched, along with the urn with her ashes, to be interred privately at a cemetery here in Winnipeg at the end of the month. (Although I disagreed with her decision, she insisted that she did not want a funeral service of any kind.)
And, for some reason, I asked for my mother’s pin tin: her hinged, metal British sweets tin (Meggeson Glycerine & Blackcurrant Pastilles), containing her much-used dressmaking pins, with their brightly-coloured heads which had so fascinated me as a child. God knows what I would ever use them for; I don’t even own a sewing machine. But it was some small part of her that I remembered: sitting on the bed in her bedroom, almost sixty years ago. pushing the coloured pins into her green chenille bedspread to make patterns. It’s funny, the things you remember.
I mentioned that I have been listening to music, digging up old playlists I had created in previous decades and carted over wholesale to Apple Music. One song led me down a rabbit hole, and I discovered that a singer whom I had grown up with, and listened to a lot as a teenager, had released a new album this year (do they even call them albums anymore? God, I feel like a dinosaur🦕🦖).
Anyway, the lyrics in the title track of the “album” spoke to me this evening:
Coming out of the dark
Coming out of this cave
It’s taken me months of days and years
To find my way
My face in the mirror doesn’t look the same
But I recognize a light in my eyes
That never did fade
And I’m gonna find
Yeah find and revive
The me that remainsLife cut me wide open
When my head hit the ground
Wasn’t my time for dying
Guess my soul just stuck around
And out of this wreckage
I’m beginning to claim
The gifts in the healing
And the me that remains
—The Me That Remains, Amy Grant (2026)
Like most queer people, I have had a complicated and conflicted relationship with organized religion. Depending on what day you ask me, I’m either agnostic or atheist. But no matter what, I will still, always, carry a soft spot in my heart for Amy Grant.