Last week I shared the story of the day I almost didn’t make it home. This week I am sharing something that felt even harder in a completely different way. Sitting at a table with my parents beside me and a kind, patient lawyer across from me, writing my will. Answering questions no one ever wants to answer. What happens to my boys if something happens and I can’t come back. What I want done with my body. Whether I want a funeral or a wake. Where I want to rest. We started with what should have felt like the simple things. I said I wanted to be cremated, talked about where I would want my ashes spread, who I would want to speak. At one point I found myself laughing through tears, remembering a Thanksgiving years ago when I joked about keeping my grandma in the freezer so she could still be part of every holiday. Somehow, in that heavy room, my parents and I laughed again at that memory, holding onto something light in the middle of something so unbearably heavy.
This has not been a new thought for me. It is something I have carried quietly for years. Since 2018, when their dad signed his rights away, and through more than thirty years of being in and out of sickness, mortality has never felt far from my mind. It has always been there, lingering in the background of my thoughts, shaping the way I plan and protect. Over the years I have thought deeply about who would step in for my boys if I ever could not. I kept a short list in my heart of people who felt right, people who shared my values, my morals, my way of loving and guiding, people who would parent as close to the way I do as anyone possibly could. I have had quiet, sometimes emotional conversations over the years, weighing what would be best for my boys, always coming back to the same question of who would love them the way they deserve.
But then it settled in. The weight of it all. I talked about wanting a place at Kingston Cemetery, near my Nana and Poppie, where eventually my family would all be together. And in that moment it hit me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I will never be able to repay my parents for the love they have given me, for the way they have carried me through every hard season. And then came the question that broke me in a different way. Who will take care of them if I am not here. I am their only child. They are in their seventies, though I hold tightly to the hope and belief that they will be here for so many more years, just like my grandmother who is ninety five and still living life fully, yes she still drives and lives independently. Her mind sharp. Still, having to even consider a world where I am not here and they are left behind is something I cannot fully put into words.
The hardest part of all was thinking about my boys. Imagining missing their lives as they grow. Not seeing them graduate, fall in love, get married, become fathers. Thinking about my son who will always need a little more guidance, a little more protection, and asking myself who will stand in that space for him. Making those decisions felt impossible, but I chose the people who have already loved them like their own, the ones who feel like family in every sense of the word. The ones my boys would choose too, the ones that they directly asked for. I made sure to write down my hopes that they will always stay connected to our family, that they will never miss the moments that matter, that they will always know where they come from and who loves them.
There were moments in that room where the questions felt clinical, almost routine to anyone else, but to me they landed like waves I could barely steady myself against. Each answer felt like I was trying to put a lifetime of love into a few sentences. How do you explain the way your child needs to be comforted when the world feels too loud. How do you write down the small things, like the way they like to be have their backs rubbed before bed, or the words that calm them, or the traditions that make them feel safe. I realized that being a parent is made up of a thousand tiny, invisible details, and the thought of someone else having to learn those without me there broke something open inside of me.
I know that just like we weave stories of the people we have lost, keeping them alive in laughter and memory, the same will be true for me. The people who know me best will carry those pieces forward for themselves and for my boys. They will tell the stories that make me human, the ones that aren’t perfect but are real and full of life. The time I said I was staying at a friend’s house but ended up at the fairgrounds for Lollapalooza, or when I was in sixth grade and came home with bunnies and somehow mine ended up living at my aunt’s house instead of mine. They will laugh about the day I got my license and clipped a parked car in downtown Poulsbo while a woman at the bank waved goodbye to me like I had it all together. They will probably even tell the story of my first hickey and how my best friend had me holding frozen spoons to my neck trying to make it disappear before anyone noticed.
These are the stories that make up who I am, the messy, funny, imperfect moments that shaped me long before I became a mom. And those stories will live on through the women who have walked beside me for most of my life, the ones who have seen every version of me and loved me through all of it. They will share those pieces with my boys when the time is right, when they are old enough to understand not just who I was as their mom, but who I was as a person. In that way, even if I am not here to tell them myself, they will come to know me in a deeper, fuller way. Not just through memory, but through stories filled with laughter, honesty, and love that will keep me alive in their hearts.
One day I might not come back home, and even writing those words feels impossible to fully accept. But what I do know, what I hold onto with everything in me, is that my closest friends and the family who have chosen to truly be present in my boys’ lives will not disappear when things get hard. They are here now. They show up. They love them, they invest in them, they make them feel seen and safe. And that matters more than anything, because it tells me that if that unimaginable day ever comes, my boys will not be left in the hands of strangers to their hearts. They will be surrounded by the same people who have already been loving them, guiding them, and standing beside us. People who didn’t have to stay but chose to anyway. And in that, there is a kind of comfort that steadies me, because I know the love my boys feel today will still be there to carry them through whatever tomorrow brings.
