My mam said hello today.
I said happy birthday back.
She’s been gone eighteen months.
It stopped me for a second — that quiet, irrational instinct to answer as if nothing had changed. But that’s the strange thing about grief: it doesn’t live in the past. It moves through time, quietly waiting in the next room, ready to remind you that love doesn’t need a body to keep breathing.
I lost my mother twice.
Once, five years before she died, when vascular dementia took her mind — and again when her body finally caught up.
There was a day she looked at me, smiled faintly, and asked if I was her father.
That’s when I learned death doesn’t always arrive with a funeral. Sometimes it happens in pieces — one forgotten name, one misplaced memory at a time.
She was born in the 1930s, into a Catholic family that knew the sound of sirens better than silence.
Her mother once saw a Zeppelin shot down in 1916, and two years before that fled the bombardment of Hartlepool.
During the war, one of Mam’s brothers refused to get out of bed when the air-raid sirens sounded — not out of fear, but defiance. “Sod Hitler,” he said, pulling the blankets tighter.
Another went the other way entirely, walking the mined beaches to collect sea coal after the bombings.
That was her family in a nutshell — stubborn, brave, contrary, and unbreakable.
Survival wasn’t something they spoke about. It was simply what you did.
We didn’t always see eye to eye. She could be sharp, stubborn, impossible at times — and nearly always right.
Even when I was sixty, she’d tell me not to get my hair cut too short because it “made me look common.”
And every time I left her, she’d say the same thing she always did: “Mind how you go.”
Keep reading — and get more
This is where the full monthly Niche Box lives. Subscribe for $5/month (or $50/year) to get:
• Monthly Niche Box (usually worth $20)
• Full archive of essays
• Early access to new pieces
Or go deeper: Pay $80/year, get everything I’ve ever published (Foundation Member) Most readers choose the monthly plan and upgrade later. Start there.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Lately, her voice keeps showing up in my head when I least expect it.
Not as memory, but as presence.
She still tells me to stand up straight, to stop overthinking, to make a proper cup of tea before I do anything important.
Even now, she’s still mothering me.
The other day, someone mentioned they’d spoken to their mother about me — on her birthday.
Without thinking, I said, “Tell her I said happy birthday.”
And then I remembered: her mother’s been gone for eighteen months.
But for a moment, it didn’t feel strange at all.
It felt right. Like the line between here and there had blurred just enough for love to slip through.
That’s when I realised — love doesn’t vanish. It just changes address.
If you’ve ever lost someone — or if you haven’t yet accepted that you already have — you’ll know this feeling.
That quiet pause when you think, I must tell them this, before the truth catches up.
That’s the ache that never really leaves. It just softens around the edges until you can carry it without breaking.
So call someone while you still can.
Say the thing you’ve been meaning to say.
Because one day, you’ll still be talking to them — only from the other side of silence.
And if you’ve lived with your heart open, they’ll still be saying happy birthday.