It happened on a random Wednesday night. The house was quiet, the world was asleep, and there I was, scrolling through TikTok like so many of us do when we can't fall asleep. Then something happened. A video made me laugh. Not just a little chuckle—but the kind of laugh that completely takes over your body. The kind where you can’t breathe, your eyes water, and you feel like you might actually pass out from laughing so hard. Absolute, total exhaustion! The “I can’t stop” kind of laugh. Growing up in my family, we had a name for those moments. We call them a "funny five minutes.” My kiddos and I have now condensed it to a Funny Five. My mom, my grandma, and my mom’s sisters would get them too. Someone would say something completely ridiculous, and suddenly we’d all be caught in one of those uncontrollable laughing fits where no one could stop. The kind where the more you try to calm down, the worse it gets, and last night, I found myself in one of those moments.
And then I heard it. My mom’s laugh. Not in my memory. Not in my head. There it was pouring out of my mouth. For a moment, I just kept laughing, almost like I was trying to hold onto it a little longer. I wasn’t even laughing internally anymore; I was aware of the laugh itself. It was her laugh. For a brief but spectacular moment, she was there with me. Laughing at something completely mundane. Something insignificant, but in that moment, it had us both in a chokehold. Just like those old “funny five minutes” we used to have together! And then just as quickly as it had started, the laughter stopped, and of course, the tears came. The kind of tears that won't allow you to catch your breath. The kind that has you sitting down and just being still for a minute. The kind that says something inside me has just shifted. As the tears ran down my cheeks, the heaviness of her being gone washed over me again.
Grief has a way of doing that. It doesn’t always arrive on the expected days. It’s not always the holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries that undo you. Those days we prepare for. We brace ourselves. We hold space for the memories. Sometimes grief shows up on a random Wednesday night when the whole world is asleep, and it invites itself in to sit with you. I would do anything to spend even one more minute with that beautiful soul, and for a second…I did just that. In that crazy laugh that was coming out of me, she was there. The beautiful thing is that she is still with me, maybe not physically, but she still lives in the spaces she so beautifully helped me create. She lives in my laugh, in the things I say, and in the expressions I catch in the mirror when I’m getting ready for the day.
My mum was my voice of reason. My first phone call on the good days and the hard ones. The person who always seemed to know exactly what to say. She was more than my mother. She was my steady ground, my comfort, and my forever friend. Parents spend a lifetime teaching us how to live in the world. They show us how to think for ourselves, how to make decisions, how to find our own strength. But loving them means one day having to live in a world they helped build… without them in it. Living in a world where they’re no longer here, well, that's a completely different kind of independence. One we never really asked for and yet somehow, they still guide us. Sometimes through the memories we shared. Sometimes, in habits we didn’t realize we inherited. And sometimes… In a laugh that comes out of nowhere.
Moments like that don’t break us. They remind us that love doesn’t disappear when someone leaves this world. It definitely changes shape, but it doesn't leave. It moves into our cherished stories, our matured voices, our laughter, and the quiet spaces where we still feel them. So if you ever find yourself suddenly crying over a memory, a song, a smell, or a laugh that sounds a little too familiar… Know this. That moment isn’t just grief. It’s love showing up again, and sometimes, just for a second…We get them back.
Cheers,
Coach Jo <3
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