It still feels surreal to write about my mom in the past tense.

I’m getting better at it — time does a lot to soften the sense of loss — but it can still trip me up at times. She’s never far from my mind, so most of the time I don’t actively think of her as gone. When she pops into my…

When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep if my mom was mad at me. There were times where I would argue with her or just get on her nerves to the point where she gave up, threw her hands in the air, and called it a night rather than continue to fight with me. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being mad at me…