I write again… the last thing I wrote was “In My Mother’s Ear” for her funeral.
I write again not because I have answers, but because silence is no longer enough—it overwhelms me.
Since my mother passed away suddenly, the word luck has been circling in my mind. Not as an abstract concept, but as an uncomfortable question. What is luck? Is it that bad things don’t happen? That illness, loss, death never arrive? Or is it something less obvious and more demanding: the way we are able to move through what does arrive?
My mother died without warning. Without goodbyes. Without signs. One day she was there, and the next I found her unconscious. Her brain had been flooded by a rush of blood caused by a 22-millimeter cerebral aneurysm. There was no room to understand, to negotiate, or to prepare. Only a brutal, definitive, categorical fact.
Is that bad luck?
These days I ask myself that question almost with guilt, as if formulating it were a betrayal. Bad luck because my mother is gone. Good luck for the mother who gave me life. The question seems to demand a binary answer, as if reality had to fit into simple categories. But it doesn’t.
I’m beginning to think that luck doesn’t live at the extremes. That it isn’t black or white, good or bad. That perhaps the way we grew up—this constant need to classify, label, explain—has led us to believe that events define the value of a life, when in fact what defines us is the relationship we build with them.
I don’t want to think that losing my mother this way, without warning, is something that should be called bad luck. I refuse to reduce her life, her love, her presence, to the way it ended. I refuse to believe that the violence of the event erases the richness of all that she was.
I am lucky.
I consider myself fortunate.
Not because difficult things haven’t happened to me, but because I had a mother whose way of being in the world continues to live in me. Because I received a way of loving, of looking, of dancing, of giving thanks, that does not dissolve with death. Because even in pain, I am able to distinguish what remains.
Maybe luck isn’t avoiding loss, but not being defined by it. Maybe it’s being able to hold grief without turning it into an identity. Maybe it’s understanding that life isn’t measured by how it ends, but by what it leaves in those of us who remain.
I don’t yet know exactly what it means to be lucky.
But I do know that I’m not willing to hand that word over to chance or to tragedy.
And that—even now, even in the middle of this absence—feels like a form of fortune.
I say it calmly and with conviction: whatever its definition may be, I have been fortunate. I have known love in its deepest and most unconditional form, and that does not disappear.