I remember the first thing I said was, "What am I going to do?"

This morning a year ago, I awoke to a world changed. Everything looked the same and except for a relatively small group of humans, nothing was changed. But I changed. A year ago last night my mother died.

I'm the kind of person who remembers dates, and they mean something to me. And while I know my husband is right, and it doesn't really matter if it has been 12 months or 13 or 8, all day yesterday I would think about July 1st last year. What I was doing at that exact time. What my mother was doing. Around noon I thought, "I've officially not spoken to my mom in a year." Throughout the day and the night before it, I thought "She had less than 24 hours to live and no one knew." In the evening I recalled the movie I had been watching when I got the phone call, what I was wearing, what we were eating. Later in the night I couldn't shake the image of the neatly typed death certificate with the precise time of death.

This has been the most challenging year of my life. Tumultuous is perhaps a good word for it. There has been plenty of good and plenty of bad and the bad has stoked the fires of my depression in a way that sometimes consumes the good. But I'm working on it.