In this moving essay, the writer pens about grief, memory, and the invisible labour of mothers that we often notice only in their absence.

A friend of mine lost his mother last month. He is 22. I have been trying to write about my mother for weeks, and every time I start, I end up thinking about him instead.

“I will miss her on my special days, but a normal Sunday is not a normal day for me. Not anymore," he said, a week after her passing, with the quiet of someone who had already cried all he could.

My story is easy, comparatively. Mine has a happy ending. His is the version that stays with you.

My mother went to Australia for two weeks. She was fine. She was coming back. I knew that.

The house was quiet. Not the peaceful quiet. It felt wrong. Uncomfortable silence.

No one called me to taste how the food was, to get something from downstairs. I had all the freedom in the world, yet I missed the rules. No one screamed at me when I made a mess of the kitchen while cooking.

A few days in, I started doing all the chores exactly how she would like them done. Follow the 'house rules' she has established over the years, such as storing curries in one type of container and desserts in another line of containers. Table mats are arranged by length, and the furniture has been meticulously dusted.

Days passed, and I began to miss her more. Not too loud. I missed her presence.

Two weeks. 14 days.

That was all it took to break me, and this is my friend's current situation: navigating the world without his mother.

The last time I spoke to him, he said, almost to himself, “I still go to the kitchen every morning hoping to see her make breakfast. I know she will not come back, but I still do it.”

I went to her funeral, and life continued for me. His life is likely still stuck there, replaying memories of his mother. I'm fortunate enough to be able to gossip with my mother, bother her, and force her to cook my favourite biryani when I crave it. He can't do it. Ever!

I am thinking about how much it costs him to cook a meal now. To sit down and eat something without knowing if it's right. To carry the house alone, not for fourteen days, but for the rest of his life, with no end to the loneliness.

The silence that broke me in two weeks is the same silence he awakens to every morning. The absence that weighed on me has now become the permanent shape of every room.

I will have my mother when I graduate from university in a year, standing, smiling, cheering. He can only look up at the sky and hope that she saw her son graduate from the university. I will still love the family gatherings and the festivals. He will spend them remembering his mother.

I struggled to keep one house running for fourteen days. He is 22, and he has to do it forever, without the person who made a house feel like home. Not just the chores. The warmth. The presence. The voice that told you when you used too much salt. All of it, gone.

My two weeks had an ending. His grief does not. He will not get lighter under it. He will only, slowly, learn to walk differently.

None of us appreciates our mothers enough. Not because we are ungrateful. Because there is no currency for it. No amount of gratitude fits the shape of what they give or the size of what is left behind when they are gone.

Hold them tighter. You do not know which goodbye is the last one.

Happy Mother’s Day.