Greetings, my lovely feral, dark, and bright ones,

My momma’s urn arrived today.

Her ashes had been sitting on a shelf in the black box they came home in, still sealed inside their original bag. I knew they were there. I passed that shelf every day knowing exactly what that box contained, yet somehow I had managed to keep a small emotional distance from what it meant. Maybe the plainness of the box helped me do that. It was temporary. It was closed. I didn’t have to disturb anything inside or confront more than I was ready to confront.

Then her urn arrived, and it was time to give Momma a permanent resting place.

My sister Vickie stayed with me on FaceTime while I did it. She walked me through everything, stayed with me when I became overwhelmed, let me cry when the emotions came, and held me up from miles away in the way someone does when they know there is nothing they can say to fix what hurts.

There are moments when you discover that being there for someone has very little to do with physical distance. Vickie could not reach through the screen and do this for me, nor could she take away what I was feeling, but she made sure I did not have to face it alone.

I took the sealed bag containing Momma’s ashes from the black box, placed it carefully inside the black velvet bag that came with her urn, and held it for a moment.

That was when it hit me.

I was holding my mother.

Not the way I wanted to hold her.

There were no arms to wrap around. No familiar warmth. No heartbeat. No voice telling me something I had probably heard a hundred times before. What I held was all that physically remained of the woman I had once been able to hug, and the difference between those two kinds of holding was almost impossible for my mind to comprehend.

I think there are moments in grief when death becomes real in an entirely new way.

We can know someone has died. We can attend funerals, sign papers, receive condolences, sort through belongings, look at photographs, and say the words they are gone. Yet some small part of the mind continues protecting us from understanding the full enormity of it all at once.

Today, another layer of that protection fell away.

It left me thinking about something I have struggled to put into words ever since: how strange it is that this is where our physical existence eventually leads.

We spend an entire lifetime becoming someone.

We build relationships and homes. We love animals. We fall in love with people. We make terrible decisions and beautiful ones. We laugh until we cannot breathe. We grieve. We argue. We forgive—or sometimes we don’t. We collect stories, scars, photographs, recipes, favorite songs, inside jokes, and memories that nobody else on Earth possesses in exactly the same way.

We become complicated, layered human beings.

And then the body that carried all of it can eventually become something small enough to hold.

I don’t know that I will ever completely make peace with that.

But perhaps that is also why choosing Momma’s urn mattered so much to me.

I chose one with a horse running through a glowing forest.

Mom loved horses. When I was growing up, she raised them, bred them, and trained them. Horses were part of the landscape of my childhood because they were part of her world.

And she taught me how to ride.

That memory has been sitting differently with me today.

When you are a child, you don’t realize you are living the memories you will someday desperately treasure. You don’t think to study every detail because you assume life will continue being life. Mom will always be Mom. The horses will always be there. There will always be another day, another conversation, another opportunity to ask the questions you didn’t think to ask.

I never could have imagined that decades later I would be choosing an urn for her and that a horse would once again become part of something connecting my mother and me.

When I look at the image now, I see more than something beautiful.

I remember that before my mother became someone I grieved, she was someone who lived.

She had passions that belonged entirely to her. She knew how to raise and train these magnificent animals. She possessed knowledge she passed down to me when she taught me to ride. There was a whole woman there beyond the title of Mom, with experiences stretching back before I existed and a lifetime of stories that cannot possibly be represented by the contents of an urn.

That realization changed the question I had been asking myself.

Maybe we are not destined to become ashes.

Maybe our bodies are.

There is a difference.

Standing there today, it was difficult to see that difference because grief makes the physical absence feel enormous. I don’t want a philosophical substitute for my mother. I want my mother. I want to hear her voice rather than remember what it sounded like. I want the possibility of another conversation. I want the ordinary comfort of knowing she exists somewhere in this world, living her life while I live mine.

Memory cannot replace that.

Love cannot replace that.

Nothing replaces a person.

But death reducing a body to ashes does not mean it reduced the life that was lived inside that body.

My mother existed.

She walked this earth. She loved horses. She raised them, bred them, trained them, and taught her daughter how to ride. She lived enough life to leave behind stories and memories that will continue surfacing in me—sometimes when I expect them and probably many times when I don’t.

Today, I gave her physical remains a place that reflects one small but meaningful piece of that life.

And I could not have done it without Vickie beside me in the way she could be.

Thank you, Vickie, for staying with me through every moment of it. Thank you for walking me through what I needed to do when my mind and heart were struggling to cooperate. Thank you for letting me cry without trying to hurry me through my grief. Most of all, thank you for making sure that when I had to do something this difficult, I did not have to do it alone.

After we finished, I looked at Momma’s urn differently.

The black box is gone from the shelf.

In its place is something beautiful. Something chosen deliberately. A horse runs freely through a forest filled with light, carrying with it a piece of a story that began long before today.

And inside rests my momma’s physical remains.

I still hate the finality of that sentence.

I probably always will.

But tonight, when I look at her urn, I am trying not to see only what death left behind.

I am trying to remember everything death could not take with it.

A little girl learning to ride.

A mother who knew horses well enough to teach her.

A lifetime of memories that seemed ordinary until time made them precious.

And a love that did not disappear simply because the person I love is no longer here for me to hold.

Today I placed my momma into her final resting place.

It hurt more than I expected.

But the horse on her urn reminds me that the ashes inside are only the final chapter of her body.

They are not the whole story of her life.

And when I think of Momma, I don’t want death to have the last word.

I want to remember the woman who lived before it.

The woman who loved horses.

The woman who taught me to ride.

My momma.

I miss you terribly, Mom.

And I love you still.

Always. ❤️🐎