I can still close my eyes and remember the sound of the stretcher wheels outside my bedroom door that cold, dark morning after she had passed. The sound of wheels hitting the hard wood floor made my bedroom door shake. If you ever heard this unique sound then you know exactly what I am talking about. It makes almost like a swishing sound. Swish. Swish. Swish-hearing this noise grow louder and louder right outside my door as the men pushed a stretcher to her bedroom to come and take her “physicality” away. I couldn’t bear to witness such a heartbreaking sight. As I heard the front door open and my father’s choked up voice say to the men wheeling her away “Be gentle. Take it slow with her.” I mustered up enough strength to pull my blinds the slightest bit and watch as they put that black bag that contained her into the car. “Goodbye mummy. Goodbye mummy” my sobbing voice said shivering with denial. and then the front door closed-and it was dead silent for hours. It was cold and dark- no one stepped foot out of their bedroom’s that morning. What was that first step into a world we didn’t know how to live be like? When we turn that knob on our door to walk out- she was no longer there anymore. She was gone.  I can vividly remember staring at my wall for what seemed like days on end. Curled up in a ball with not a clue in the world of how to even begin a life without her.  Denial and shock kept me going that first week and then came Hope. It was hope that got me out of bed every morning. You see. Hope for someone that is now gone almost teases your brain into thinking they will come back. Those first couple months I truly believed I would see her again. I hoped for the moment I would turn the corner and she would come running to me with open arms.I can’t even begin to tell you how fixated my mind became in believing this would happen. Then came reality. The realization that this really did happen. It wasn’t just a awful dream. I needed to wake up. Breathe in this new air of a new life. Accept it. But what I didn’t know, what I had failed to read and understand and what took me almost two years to come to this realization is that the hardest part about death, the real hell about losing a loved one.. is that I was going to endure. I was going to be okay. Never the same. But that I would survive this and it would eventually become my beloved past. It would become the first 22 chapters in my book of life. There would come the day that this new normal felt real and I began to live again. I was going to witness and see things my eyes had never seen. Feel things I had never felt and live. Oh, I began to live a life with heart and unconditional love. Her heart poured into me. and I can promise you that the heart endures loss. It keeps beating. It beats with her love every single day. It will be two years in March that she has been gone. When I go home to the ocean, I stand on the sand and look past the horizon as I let the freezing cold water tickle my toes. She comes to me. Wraps her angel wings around me and I can feel her presence as the wind blows through my hair. She is still very much here .We are just worlds apart. I am so grateful and crazy in love for my angel mummy. xox