Good night. I love you. God bless.

Mom,

Every night when we were kids, just before the lights went out, you would say the same seven words to me and Jen before tucking us warm into our beds:

“Good night, I love you, God bless.”

And every night, without fail, we’d say them back.

Back then, I never realized how much those words would come to mean to me. They were more than just part of our bedtime routine. They were comfort. Safety. Love. Home.

Now the house feels eerily quiet without you in it. Not the peaceful kind of quiet either; the kind that feels hollow. Empty. Like something important is missing from every room. I still expect to hear your voice, or the sound of your rocking chair moving gently by the living room window.

I keep thinking about how lost I feel now that you’re gone. Like I’ve lost my anchor and I’m drifting somewhere I don’t recognize, with nothing solid to hold onto. It reminds me of being a little boy with you at Zellers or the Met, and that awful feeling when I’d suddenly lose sight of you. That panic would hit my chest so fast; scanning every face, heart pounding, hoping to find the one person who made everything feel okay again.

Only this time, you’re not waiting just around the next aisle.

There’s a constant ache in my chest now. A deep, gnawing emptiness that follows me everywhere. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking, I’ve got to tell Mom about this, before realizing you’re not here anymore.

Everyone said your funeral was beautiful. Maybe it was. But standing there saying goodbye to you was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And yet, even that pain couldn’t compare to being there with you on the kitchen floor, hearing you ask me to help you while we waited for the ambulance to come.

I can still hear your voice calling out to me. I can still see everything so clearly. That moment is burned into me, and I don’t think I’ll ever escape it. I see it every time I close my eyes.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you, Mom. I’m sorry I couldn’t take your pain away. That helpless feeling tears me apart inside because all I wanted was to save you.

I made sure they played How Great Thou Art at your funeral. I know how much you loved that song. I can still hear you softly humming it in the kitchen sometimes while you moved around the house. I would give anything just to hear that one more time.

You were the kindest person I’ve ever known. You never had a bad word to say about anyone. No matter how upset or angry I was, you always found a way to calm me down and bring me back to myself.

Your faith was part of who you were. You reminded me so much of Gram Keenan that way. The two of you with your little bags of prayers, faithfully said every day. I can still picture your prayer beads, the ones Bernadette gave you, resting gently in your hands while you sat in your rocking chair by the window, twiddling your fingers the same way Gram McLaughlin used to.

You loved life in such simple, beautiful ways.

Sitting on the front deck on warm summer days, watching cars drive by and waving at the familiar ones. Picking lilacs in the yard when they bloomed. Doing crossword puzzles at the kitchen table. Playing cards with family and laughing that soft laugh of yours. Going for drives just to get out of the house for a while, even if it was the same roads you’d traveled a hundred times before.

You found joy in little things most people overlooked.

The world feels darker without you here, Mom.

Losing you is like losing a part of myself; the part that held me together, the part that made me feel whole. And without you, there’s this unbearable emptiness, like something inside me has been taken and can never be replaced. I feel like that lost little boy again, endlessly searching, knowing deep down I’ll never fully find my way back to the way things used to be.

You never liked looking up at the night sky, but I always have. And now, when I look up and see the stars flickering, I can’t help but feel like you’re there somehow; watching over us, loving us the same way you always did.

And every night, I find myself looking up, searching that sky the way I once searched the aisles for you, with that same helpless feeling in my chest, and whispering those same words again, hoping, somehow, you can still hear me.

Good night. I love you. God bless.