Growing up, I envied kids who had both parents. My mom didn’t die or disappear in some tragedy—she chose to leave when I was 11.
She walked away from my dad and me and stayed gone for years. Then one day she showed up at my door, sick, saying she didn’t have much time left. She asked to move back into the home where she had raised me.
I said no.
The next day, the police came. She had passed away. I stood there frozen, unsure if I felt grief, anger, guilt, or just emptiness. I was listed as her emergency contact.
A day later, her lawyer brought me a small box. Inside was an old photo of me as a kid, her arms wrapped around me, both of us smiling. Beneath it, a letter.
She wrote that she never stopped loving me. She said she had been broken, that she ran from responsibility, and watched my life from afar, too afraid to face what she’d done. She asked for forgiveness—not to ease her guilt, but so I wouldn’t carry her mistakes.
I cried for the child who waited and the adult who never had closure.
I didn’t forgive everything. But I released enough to breathe.
And I chose not to let bitterness define my life.
