I drove through downtown Ashland the morning after Mother died. A crowd of people stood waiting to cross the street at the corner of Oak and Main. I saw them in their tourist clothes, office clothes, work-out clothes. Nobody in mourning clothes. They were laughing, talking, living life. It was all wrong.

It wasn’t a new kind of day for them. If they’d known of our loss, they would have expressed their condolences, and gone on across the street to the bank.

We buried Mother. Days passed. Friends and family phoned and wrote and sat with us and prayed with us during Shiva, the first week of the year-long formal Jewish mourning period. People were kind. I thought their presence would be healing. I expected things to be easier by the end of the week. It wasn’t so. By the last day of Shiva, I was moving from numbness into active grief.

I talked with my friend Justin shortly after Mother died. “When my own mother died,” he told me, “I felt as if a mighty oak had been wrenched from my heart.”

The hole she left was that big. This wrenching feeling . . . I recognized it. I felt it almost from the beginning. There was the gentle passing, and then the ache began, the ache of this gaping wound. Every thought, every sight, every memory brought me back to it.

I returned to my demanding job as the executive director of our local community dispute resolution center, and I functioned. But I crept always along the edge of sadness. A particular comfort in those early times was a letter I received from my dear friend Lu who had lost her mother the year before. That she understood was a thin, strong ray of light through the pain, and I read her letter again and again.

I yearned for a book that could show me how to do this thing: to live in a world where there was no Mother to laugh with me, talk with me, advise me—hug me. Therese Rando’s book, How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies, was a great help. I appreciated the way she explained things. She wrote about anticipatory grief, the grief I felt even before Mother died. She normalized my experiences after the death, helped me understand my mood swings, helped me know I wasn’t crazy. But she didn’t show me enough of her own experience. I wanted to know more about what it was like for her. I wanted her to show me how I could do it myself.

My relationship with Mother was, is, extraordinary. We were blessed to really know each other as adults, had a chance to grow beyond the mother-daughter complications. We learned to relax our roles, change them for new ones. We became dear friends.

And what do you do, how do you grieve the loss of a mother who is also your best friend, mentor, role model, spiritual sister? How do you grieve your partner in playfulness, supporter of girlish and womanly explorations? Where do you go for solace when your comforter dies? Inside, into the depths of Spirit. Outside, to your family, to your community. Farther out, into the Vastness. Some of this I knew before Mother’s death, and some of it I learned in grieving and healing.

At some point I realized that grief could transform me, transform itself, but that it wouldn’t really end. There were times when slogging through the mire of confusing thoughts and feelings was all I did. The Dance of Life continued. The balance shifted.

After Mother died, I was absolutely clear about what is important. Then I gradually began to worry about the little things again—the long grocery lines, the apparent slight delivered by a co-worker. Healing went underground, continued on a subliminal level. It was no longer daily in the center of my attention.

Grief had made itself a presence in my life, and I rode it like the bow wave of a speedboat. It drew me along, then I’d move off center and it would toss me into the air, all askew until I’d settle back into the flow.

The journey continues. Occasional dramatic interludes transform the hours, the weeks, of moving through. I look back on the last six years and see the “insurmountable” challenges which my family and I have somehow survived, and I know now that life goes on. We go on. A new kind of wholeness emerges, a whole with a gap in the center, like a bagel, like a doughnut. Life is delectable again. Usually.

I am finding my balance, and I move through my days with a broadening view. I move slowly, reintegrate myself into the world around me. Grief remains. Life will not be held back. Grief and Life entwine like partners dancing—undulating, grounded, steady. Exuberant. Serious. Patient. The dancers move through soft sand, sinking, sinking; glide on glare ice; sail through the air in a joyous leap of faith. There is something to dance about. Yes.

Healing emerges. Grief dashes to the fore—a slip of paper tucked in a drawer, a poem in Mother’s hand, a favorite recipe, a special song. Tears flow. The center is missing, but the memories are sweet.

And insights emerge, signs of a deepening awareness, signs of the spiritual journey that began years ago and continues still. My personal spirituality, my life-long practice, has given me the strength to go on. It is the vessel that holds the grief.