Homesick for You

Of all the days on the calendar, your birthday still arrives like a tsunami wave I cannot stop.

So, I duck dive. I surrender. And somehow, I survive.

Tomorrow, the world will call it another day, but my heart will whisper..."it's Mom's birthday".

You would be 72 years young. And suddenly remembering this makes me feel homesick again.

Not for a place, not for a house with familiar walls, but for you.

Homesick for your voice calling my name from another room. "Lucy" or "Lucy de las Carmines Carmines Carmines", nicknames only you could make sound like music.

Homesick for your laughter, for the way you made ordinary days feel safe and complete.

Homesick to hear your voice in worship, one arm lifted to the sky, the other enthusiastically banging a tambourine, completely unconcerned with rhythm and wholly devoted to joy.

Homesick for the comfort of simply knowing you were in this world, breathing beneath the same sky as me for thirty-six years of my life.

People think grief softens with time, and maybe it does. But what they don't tell you is that love simply restructures itself. It rebrands. It finds new ways to announce its presence. Love becomes recognizable in the most ordinary moments.

It lives in songs, scents, dreams, recipes, stories, and unexpected moments that stop you in your tracks.

Tomorrow, I will think of your hands. The hands that cared for everyone. Manchitas, arrugitas, and all.

I will think of your smile, the one thing that could calm every storm inside me.

I will think of the countless ways you loved me without ever saying the words "love" or "amor". You didn't need to. You spoke it fluently through your actions.

And I will ache.

Because losing you didn't just leave an empty chair at the table. It left a space inside my heart that no one else can occupy. A place I am always traveling toward. I expect to find a hammock waiting for me beneath the shade, where I can rest and relive every memory. Yet this place and feeling I crave remains just beyond my reach.

That is what being homesick feels like now.

It is nauseating and beautiful.

It is sadness and joy existing at the same time.

It is love wrapped around loss.

It is tangled and knotted and somehow still sacred.

It is hearing a song and wanting to call you.

It is seeing something beautiful and instinctively turning to share it, only to remember that eye contact now belongs strictly to memory.

Tomorrow, on your birthday, I will light a candle for you. I will teach my classes and hope I inspire my students. You were my favorite student and teacher, Mom.

There are moments when I feel desperate for a reminder of your love. And my God, do you deliver.

A bright green grasshopper lands nearby.

A hummingbird appears at just the right moment.

A yellow and black dragonfly lands on the plants I water.

A tiny messenger always arrives unannounced.

Animals remain your modus operandi, and I'm here for it. I expect no less from you.

If heaven has birthdays, I hope they are filled with music, joy, and all the people you love. I hope there is endless dancing and your favorite food! Food was always your love language, Mama. I hope there is laughter so loud it echoes through eternity.

As for me, I will celebrate you the only way I know how:

• by missing you

• by loving you

• and by carrying you with me through another year

Because after almost five years, Mom, I am still homesick for you.

And I suspect I always will be.

What a blessing that is.

To have loved someone so completely that their absence still feels like a place.

To be homesick for a person.

To miss you this deeply is proof that I was loved this deeply.

And for that, I will be forever grateful.