Grief is weird and never-ending.

I was standing in front of the Jewish cooking section of my mom’s cookbook collection. The Jewish holiday season snuck up on me as usual, I’m excited for it and dreading it in equal measure.

I picked through a couple of books to flip through and carried them up to my apartment, thinking about how the grieving process is so weird in its ebbs and flows, never-ending. There are dates that I will obviously miss her - the day she passed, her birthday, my birthday. The wedding anniversary shared between my husband and I, and my parents, February 9th.

Then holidays like Rosh Hashanah will come up and I’ll be missing the days when she’d call me and say “it’s Rosh Hashanah, the work day is done, come over for a glass of wine, cheese, and apples.” Or on Halloween when she’d text me saying, “I know you’re going out, but can you stop by so I can see your costume?”

Grief is like a little thread that dances through everything, stitching together timelines, sitting just below the surface of everyday life. It’s there in the good and there in the bad and there in the monotonous.