I was once told by an intuitive that the next time I saw my mother she would look young like when I was a kid. She passed away six and a half years ago. She was 61. I passed the mirror a few weeks ago and without thinking, saw my mom. It caught me off guard. I don’t feel like I look like my mother. Yet I have come to a place where my skin has thinned and wrinkled the right amount and my ability to be polite over real has diminished. And with this, I get flashes of my mom. I sing songs that make no sense to my kids and my patience for behavior that lacks self-awareness is non-existent. The amount of red wine I drink is in direct proportion to time spent with screaming kids and navigating in-laws and I cannot resist a good sentimental cry after a few cocktails. I am my mother.

After she passed I did not feel her presence. Despite the time I cried and asked her to come to me and within 5 minutes a buck and a gaggle of turkeys surrounded me or the time I asked for a shooting star from her and at that moment one came. Those were fleeting moments. But the gaps between made my heart ache and I longed for her. It was not until I had Eloise and she began speaking that I felt my mother around me.

When my eldest daughter, Eloise, was just over one and barely talking she pointed to a wolf on TV and said, “grandma, I love her.” My mother was deeply connected to wolves. And the other night I was tucking in Eloise and she asked me if we all die. She is three and this is not our typical bed time chat. I fumbled through some things and finally she said, “grandma told me that when we die we get reborn.” Well, OK. Thank you mom for covering that. She is unquestionably linked to my daughter and these are just a couple of the countless stories I have about them. She knows my daughter and my daughter knows her. And I know this in my soul to be true. I’ve never cried over or lamented that she did not meet my husband and will never meet my kids. I just always felt she knew them somehow. And every time Eloise talks about her grandma or somehow my mother’s favorite book surface in Eloise’s hands, I find confirmation.

The thing is, she never left me. She has always been with me and in me and around me. And when I think of the intuitive telling me I would see her again and she would look like she did in her thirties, I see how metaphors play out in real life. I see her in me. She is in me. She is me. I’m realizing the lines between life and death and one life and another are much more faint than I previously thought.

Eloise has always bore a striking resemblance to me as a kid. And now she is starting to act like me. It is odd and wonderful all wrapped into one. Both my daughters seem to be born with, let’s call them, quirks of mine; this incessant need to drink water until gasping for air, this odd morning stretch that must be done immediately upon waking and the inability to communicate a desire without shear panic, to name a few. The circle of life continues. I am in my daughters and they are in me and my mother is in them. It is a perfectly played piece of music. A record spinning round and round where familiarity leads to reflection which leads to introspection. Each time the song is played it gets better and deeper and is more firmly rooted with meaning and purpose. Parents are a visual reminder that we are made from our environment. We are all an amalgamation of many people, things, experiences and ideas. We are inescapably connected. I’ve come to find an inner peace in the loss of my mother. I miss her everyday and yet I feel her as if she is always sitting on the other side of my daughter which comforts me and brings her into my life again.

When we lose someone. We lose a form of them. But I believe that they never leave. When I tap into my memories, my heart and my soul then I am only a breath and a thought, or a glance in the mirror, away from my mother.