At 32, my mom bundled us up, watched the school bus go by on the street behind ours, and walked me and my six-year-old sister to the bus stop. While we were at school and my dad at work, Mom watched my two-year-old sister and made our house a home: buying groceries and cooking hearty meals for us, keeping the house clean and tidy, crafting outfits with puff-paint details for my siblings and me, and helping Dad with work projects.

At 32, on January 16, my mom sat down in our blue recliner, her heart unexpectedly stopped, and she died. Doctors told Dad she did not have a heart attack. Their best theory: long QT syndrome, a condition that cannot be tested for post mortem.

At 8, I left for school that snowy morning and she’d been alive and well. When I arrived home that night, after a day of disruption, I paused on the carpeted stairs of our split-level home. Mom had pulled my hair into a ponytail that morning. At eight, I mourned the need to undo her work, pull out the blue band holding my curly brown hair together, an act of love she’d never do again—the first of many micro-fractures of loss.

At 11, I began competitively swimming—an activity Mom hadn’t enjoyed. Dad had instilled a love of water in me through summers at the lake while Mom sunned herself. She’d played softball and was a skilled bowler—her old trophies lined a bookcase in a closet. Over the next decade, I logged hours, laps, seconds, and miles, down and back, in lukewarm, frigid, chlorinated, salty pools and collected my own ribbons and trophies. I like to imagine her annual Christmas letters would have underlined my accomplishments with pride and love, but I won’t ever have that evidence.

At sweet 16, I had lived half Mom’s lifespan and inherited her car. What was I driving toward? What was in my rearview mirror? Was I halfway to my death too?

At 17, I’d lived longer without Mom than I had with her.

At 19, the impossible score in cribbage (my Minnesotan family’s comfort game), I tried to donate blood but had an irregular heartbeat. An electrocardiogram and ultrasound later performed on my heart found nothing irregular. A fluke?

Mom’s autopsy report reads as a litany of “unremarkable” comments. And yet, she was thirty-two. She left behind three girls under eight years old and her husband, all bewildered at her sudden, remarkable absence.

At 20, I vacated the I’s and opposing plus-signs I’d navigated on thousands of days in the pool to instead dedicate myself to words. At twenty, I renounced presumed friends to defend my relationship with my then-friend-now-husband, Ben. I’m told Mom lived to be a mom, but I never got to ask her what chapters she willingly closed, what she chose to lose in an effort to gain.

At 21, I told Ben my greatest fear was dying young. Leaving children without a mother. A spouse without a wife.

At 21, she married Dad. I was twenty-seven when I married Ben. I had known him for eight years—as much time as I had had with Mom. Did he know me as much as she did or more?

At 24, Mom birthed me, her firstborn. At twenty-three, I earned a Master of Fine Arts. She never earned an undergraduate degree. My thesis focused on her death. At twenty-four, I became an assistant professor. I was increasingly aware of how my life didn’t add up to hers, a stay-at-home mom, and I ached for a continuation of her yearly Christmas letters to better assess my choices—what would she have highlighted?

At 26, Mom had given birth to two children. I gave birth to my first at twenty-nine.

At 29, I looked at my perfect daughter and my greatest fear birthed a terror beyond myself. At night I woke, frantically throwing covers to rush to the nursery before my infant careened over the top of her crib onto the hard, red oak floor and into mortal danger. Ben grabbed my wrist, jolting me conscious: our child was sleeping, perfectly safe.

At 30, I was two years short of her lifespan. Thirty was a year of daily, weekly, monthly firsts for me. Firsts as a mom. Firsts without Mom. Firsts for my child. Mom gave birth to her last child at thirty.

At 31, I told Ben I didn’t want to celebrate my thirty-second birthday. I sobbed, “I don’t want to have a birthday. I don’t want it to exist.”

At 32, it takes my breath away to consider what Mom’s last thoughts might have been as I ponder what my last conscious thoughts would be. Did she know she was dying, or did she slide into unconsciousness akin to falling asleep? Given her relaxed state in our blue recliner, I want to believe it was the latter. But there’s a part of me that wants her to have fought, resisted with every cell of her body, being taken away from her three daughters, husband, and beloved dog.

At 32, I’ve written a letter to my daughter on each of her birthdays. I’ve filled her baby book with as much detail as I can. I’ve daily recorded at least one feature of her activities on notebook paper magnetized to the refrigerator. I’ve detailed my hopes for her. I’ve drafted my will.

At 32, I count the days till I’m Mom’s exact age, and I wonder if my two-year-old would remember me if I died today. Would she need to rely on photos to recall my oval face, brown eyes, brown hair, long fingers like her own? Might videos be her only source of the way I move, my laughter, the way I say “Good morning, Sunshine!” each day when I get her out of bed? Would she recall the way we dance to help things bake faster? The way I playfully threaten to eat her toe beans unless she puts socks on? The way I’d rock her to the ends of the earth if that made her feel better? Even with eight years with Mom, Mom is frozen in snapshots in my mind, her voice limited to home videos.

At 33, I will be older than Mom ever was. At thirty-three, I will give birth to my second child, a month earlier than her due date. I will be as unprepared for my unexpected admittance to the hospital as I was to visit Mom on the day of her death. However, I will be prepared to fiercely love the wonder of my child’s five pounds. As I walk her to sleep one night and pray for her health, happiness, and safety, I will be humbled by the realization that Mom would surely still desire those conditions for me.

The January 16th following my second child’s birth will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mom’s death. For the twenty-fifth year I will time-travel back to my eight-year-old self who didn’t know she was saying goodbye forever to Mom when she boarded the school bus. I will lament my mom not knowing my children as much as I lament my children not knowing my mom.

Death’s ripples extend outward, raising the stakes at each life event and colliding with more nerve endings. Despite being a writer, I suspect I will always be doing age math, always adding and subtracting for meaning, always trying to make the numbers add up to more time with Mom.

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