I Grieved My Mother Before She Died | Grieving An Estranged Mother

When the final phone call came, I discovered the tears had already been shed years earlier.

I turned 53. Five Days Later, at the age of 74, my mother passed away..

There were no final goodbyes. She didn’t reach out to tell me she had been ill. She didn’t call for me to be with her at the end. In fact, no one contacted me until after she had already passed because that was her request. In the end, just as in life, she chose silence and withdrawal over open communication rooted in truly hearing one another from love.

Yesterday afternoon, when the call came in, I felt surprisingly neutral about the information. At first, I wondered if I was simply delaying the grief. I expected I might wake up in the coming days with a deeper ache over her passing. Yet less than twenty-four hours later, I remain calm and centered within my breath.

A quiet whisper keeps moving through me:

“You are not sad because you already processed the loss of your mother years ago. You already grieved. You cried until there were no tears left. It is safe now to rest.”

Deep down, I know that whisper is true.

A Woman Carrying Pain | Grieving An Estranged Mother

I won’t go into all the details of my relationship with my mother because the details aren’t really the point.

What matters is that she was a beautiful woman carrying tremendous pain. She was never capable of fully processing that pain, so it emerged in ways that protected her from further hurt. She did the best she could with a nervous system inflamed by rage and betrayal wounds, a body used for both pleasure and pain by those who should have protected her, and a mind encased in fear and judgment.

She did the best she could with what she had to work with, and for that, I will always be grateful.

In the end, though, we never found healing together in our spiraling breath space. She couldn’t have the difficult heart-to-heart conversations that healing requires, and I could no longer deny my truth or silence my voice to keep her comfortable in hers.

The Last Attempt

A few years ago, deep in the spiral of my own healing journey, I reached out one final time.

I called her on FaceTime and shared what was on my heart. I expressed love for what she did right. I thanked her where gratitude was deserved. I also spoke honestly about the places where drugs, alcohol, and unprocessed trauma had placed me in danger as a child.

We talked about pain. We talked about trauma. We talked about how unprocessed experiences continue living inside the body until they are finally felt and released.

The conversation was awkward, uncomfortable, and tender all at once. She was visibly hurt by my honesty, but we made it through the call. She let me say what was on my heart. While I didn’t receive everything I wanted, I believed we had made progress because, for the first time, we were speaking truth.

At least, that’s what I thought.

By morning, she had blocked my number and every avenue of communication.

A few years later, after reading Many Lives, Many Masters, I tried one final time. I wanted to send her a letter and a copy of the book. I was denied entry into her life once again and told:

“She doesn’t want to deal with your drama. She just wants peace.”

Peace Is a Funny Word

Peace is a funny word, isn’t it?

It’s something we all crave. Something we all seek. Yet peace isn’t something we achieve by burying trauma or avoiding hard conversations. Peace isn’t found through silence.

Peace, true peace, is found by facing trauma. Facing pain. Facing the shadows of how that pain has shaped our lives.

My mother wasn’t living in peace by burying her trauma and my voice in the process. She was breathing pain. I simply reached a point where I could no longer share that breath loop with her.

The Grieving Happened Years Ago

After that final communication was shut down, I grieved. This is where I truly began grieving-an-estranged-mother

I grieved for the mother I wanted and would never have. I grieved the relationship that could have been. I grieved her pain and my pain together. I cried until there were no tears left.

I knew in that moment I would never be allowed to speak with her again.

I remember saying out loud:

“I have grieved this loss like a death.”

Of course, we say things like that in moments of heartbreak and never truly know if they are accurate until the final hour arrives. It turns out, for me, they were.

What Shadow Work Taught Me

Something profound happens when we commit to shadow work.

We discover that the fears, judgments, and shame we have hidden away are not things to fear at all. They are gifts. They are breadcrumbs leading us home.

Uncovering those gifts requires courage. It requires a willingness to face the parts of ourselves that aren’t polished, spiritual, enlightened, or glorious. It asks us to sit with the raw and vulnerable places inside ourselves and meet them with love instead of judgment.

At some point, you begin to realize that some of what you called empowerment was actually self-protection. Some of your judgments of others were revealing places within yourself that still needed love. Some of the stories you carried were never truths at all, but survival strategies.

This is where true peace begins.

Not in perfection.

Not in denial.

But in radical honesty.

Facing our shadows is empowering because it gives us the opportunity to own our flaws and love them for the survival mechanisms they once were. From that place, we can release the judgment clouding our field and move into a peace that comes only from aligning our breath with truth itself.

If my mother could have embraced this journey with me, I believe we would have bonded on soul-deep level. I still continue to choose growth over fear. For me it’s the only way to true alignment.

My Heroine’s Journey

My heroine’s journey began seven years ago with a nervous breakdown.

At the time, I believed I had already done a lifetime of healing work. What I didn’t understand was that talking about pain is not the same as healing pain.

Pain must be felt.

It must be breathed with.

It must be witnessed.

It must be breathed with and released.

Over the last seven years, there have been profound losses. Some brought me to my knees more than once, begging for relief from whoever might be listening beyond the veil.

Yet through every challenge, one thing remained constant.

I always went inward.

Deeper into my spiral.

Looking for understanding. Looking for truth. Looking for how to become the highest and best version of myself, first for myself and then for those I love.

Even in my darkest hours, I always believed something was happening for me.

Holding More Than One Truth

At 53 years old, I know something I didn’t know before.

Shadows are not the enemy.

They are not something to fear.

It is safe to look into the darkness within ourselves because it is the only way we truly find our light.

I have faced my shadows. I have walked with them, cried with them, loved them, and eventually breathed them into release. I have learned to express with love rather than lash out from pain. I have learned that healing doesn’t require us to become perfect. It requires us to become honest.

So when I say my mother’s passing has left me neutral, I do not mean disconnected.

I mean I can now observe my feelings without becoming them.

I can love my mother deeply and still acknowledge that some of her choices caused harm. I can have compassion for her pain and compassion for my own. I can hold more than one truth at the same time without forcing either into a small box of judgment or shame.

That is what healing has given me.

For Anyone Walking Their Own Shadow Path

Wherever you are on your own shadow journey, allow yourself the space and grace to love yourself exactly as you are, exactly in this moment.

You are not lost. You are not broken. You are not too much.

And neither are your shadows.

Wanting to talk about your pain as a way to heal and release can be empowering. That may make others around you uncomfortable. Sometimes our willingness to face our shadows illuminates the places where another person is not yet willing or able to face their own. This is about them and their discomfort and has nothing to do with you or your journey.

It’s okay to evolve and we cannot evolve without acknowledging our growth.

You have done the very best you could with the awareness you had at each stage of your life. When we know better, we do better. Isn’t that the entire point of being here? To learn. To grow. To remember.

Many people judge growth because it requires us to face our shadows. I have come to believe the opposite.

Our shadows are not evidence of our failure. They are often the doorway to our greatest gifts.

And sometimes, when we finally have the courage to walk through that doorway, we discover the peace we were searching for all along.

As I look back, I can see that this journey was connected to so many other moments of becoming. I had to learn to see difficult emotions as information rather than failure, understand that choosing myself could sometimes be misunderstood by others, and eventually recognize that breath could become a bridge back to my own knowing. None of those lessons erased the past. They changed the way I carried it.

Warm Love,

Luna

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A Note on New Physics

The world of physics is continually evolving, and as it does, our vocabulary, interpretations, and relationship to what we understand must evolve with it. It is important that we expand alongside consciousness rather than become limited by what we understood yesterday. Curiosity allows us to keep exploring the connections between breath, body, energy, consciousness, and the greater field, while remaining open to what new understanding may continue to reveal.