Love, when given room, wants to keep growing. And Luna is love. She’s like pure vanilla, love. When I meditate, I feel her changing. I don’t know if it is maturity, wisdom, or the deepening of her soul, but she feels different to me than she did in the beginning.
When she first died, she bombarded me. She was loud, insistent, almost impatient. Unwilling to let me forget that she was still there. I could hear her voice so clearly.
“Mama.”
She had opinions. Wants. Thoughts. Feelings. She would direct me the way she always had, with that certainty she carried in her little body. And I would ask her questions. So many questions. Am I making the right choice? What will happen to us? What do I do about this person? What about the people who hurt me? Should I stay angry? Should I forgive them? She would skip right over most of it. Almost as if those questions were too small to bother with.
Like a child, but also like Luna, but also somehow like a great teacher who had suddenly gained access to a much larger view. She was not interested in the small fries. She kept returning me to the same things. Love, forgiveness, presence, peace.
And every night, I dreamt of her. I would find her the way you find a child you thought had wandered away for only a moment. There you are. She would be running naked through the yard, laughing. I would open my closet and she would be hanging upside down. Or lying in a field. I would be startled every time. Oh. There you are. You were right in front of me all along. And she would smile back at me as if to say, obviously, “I have been waiting.”
Now she comes differently and carefully and less often. I sometimes think she knows when to step back. She leaves space for Penelope, for Koa, for Shaughn and for me. When she comes now, it feels intentional. The messages are clearer. She shows me things on her terms, but somehow honors mine too.
I had a dream recently that we were in a Halloween store together. She was sitting in the shopping cart, grinning from ear to ear. Fall was always our favorite season. The anticipation of Christmas, the start of the stream of holidays. We lived for decorating the house, going to HomeGoods, We loved fall together.
In the dream, I looked at her and immediately started panicking. Should I take you to the hospital? Do you still have cancer? Are you sick? How long do I get to have you? How much time do we have? She just looked at me. That look. “Mama, look where we are.” We are Halloween shopping.
I could feel what she was telling me without her saying it. Just stay here. Be here. Enjoy what is in front of you. So I stopped asking. Okay, I thought. I am just going to enjoy you.
And she smiled. “Yes.” I kept pushing the cart down the aisle so excited to spend a fall with her in tow.
Then I woke up. For a few seconds, I lay there feeling like I had been given a secret night with her. Her sitting there like I had chosen her from all the children in the world. Which I did. Which I still do. Every day. Now, when I beg for her, I often see that same smile. Almost amused with me. As if she is reminding me that my life is still happening. There are other things I am supposed to enjoy. Koa cries and pulls me back into the room. Penelope needs something, someone texts, a client is waiting, dinner needs to be made.
You can’t meditate all day, Mama. And somewhere inside myself, I answer her. But my heart is with you always. “I know,” she says. She seems to respect the rhythm of my days now.
She honors the need to make space for the living. And still, my tether to her is unbreakable. My love for her is so consuming that sometimes I worry about the shadow it casts. Over Penelope and Koa definately. But also over me.
She is my firstborn. My favorite person in the whole world. And now, my favorite person on the other side. Sometimes I wonder if we made an agreement before this life began. I imagine her sitting across from me somewhere before bodies, before time, before either of us knew exactly how hard this would be.
Maybe she said:
I will come as your daughter. I will teach you about love. I will show you what it means to open and to break, to change and to hurt, to feel despair and anguish, to question everything and recreate yourself from the pieces. I will shine a light into every corner of your life so that you can see yourself clearly. I will help you find freedom because I love you.
And maybe I answered:
Yes. Let’s do this together. Let’s sign up for this life.
I know how strange that might sound. And maybe I just want to make it make sense. Something that i will never understand. But some days it is the only idea large enough to hold what happened. Because I can feel her growing now.
When I meditate and try to hold her, she feels farther away and somehow more everywhere. Less singular. Less like a little girl standing in one place. More like something spread through everything. She is learning lessons without my permission now. Without my guidance. Without me packing the snacks or reminding her to bring a sweatshirt or asking if she brushed her teeth.
And I think she likes the freedom. Still, she feels tender and full of forgiveness. Just as she was here. Just as she is there.
She reminds me to soften. To listen when something feels wrong and to forgive when I can. She tells me to give people a break and to let people go.
Maybe this is what people mean when they say love evolves after death. Not that grief ends or that loss gets smaller. But that the relationship changes shape. The screaming changes, it gets less. The desperation softens around the edges. The urge to follow her fades. And eventually there is room again. Room for life to rise alongside loss. Room for a new baby and for Penelope to grow taller. Space for Shaughn and I to share laughter that does not immediately feel like betrayal.
But still. I need you, Lu. I will always save you a seat. I will always remember the softness of your cheeks. The brush of the little hairs on your legs against mine when we sat close together. The smell of the crown of your head. Your warm weight beside me. Your humanness. I am terrified of losing those details. So I keep them. I tuck them into my mind. Into my body. Like a little vault inside my heart where I store the things I refuse to let time take from me.But i use it like a prism and shine your light onto others. A little lighthouse inside me. Your light moving through my heart and, if I am lucky, reaching someone else in the middle of their own storm.
Use me, I tell you. Use me to help people. Use what happened to us and what you taught me. Life cannot go on without you because you are mixed into everything now. There is no version of me without you.
There is no version of our family without you. You are in the way we parent.The way we celebrate and worry. You have taught us to forgive. You are the way Penelope loves her brother. The way I hold Koa longer than I need to. The way I understand suffering when someone sits across from me and tells me theirs. You are in everything we ever loved. Everything we ever created. I love you now more than ever, which I did not know was possible.
Sometimes my longing feels like chasing a dream that disappears the moment I wake. I reach for it and I try to pull it back. Reconstruct the missing pieces. Her face was here and her hand was here. She said something. What did she say? And then, every once in a while, the whole thing crashes over me vividly. Oh yes that was the dream. That was my life. You were real. You were here.
And so I return again to the possibility of that agreement. The idea that maybe we chose one another before I understood what choosing you would require. That you came to teach me love in its fiercest form and loss in its most devastating.
That you came to transform me. Maybe that was the vow all along. To break me open and tether me to you forever. Even though my humanness hurts.Even though my arms ache for the weight of you. Even though there are days I would trade every lesson, every transformation, every piece of wisdom just to hear your feet running down the hallway again.
I feel your wings soaring and your spirit stretching and growing. And here I am, still your mother. Wanting to believe you are free. And also wanting to reach into whatever world holds you and pull you back into my arms.
Maybe this is the deepest truth of motherhood. We spend our lives loving our children toward their becoming. We teach them to walk away from us, to grow, to change, to belong to themselves. And then we stand there with our arms open, aching from the distance, loving them anyway.
Love, when given room, wants to keep growing. I used to think that meant growing together. Now I know it can also mean learning how to love across an impossible distance. How to let the relationship change without believing it has ended. How to let my daughter become something I cannot fully understand while remaining completely, eternally mine.
Luna is still love. Pure like vanilla, love.
Only now she is everywhere. Not just in her bottle.
Written by
Saira Crawford
Writer | Psychotherapist | Art Therapist | Impact Coach
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