Jenny doesn’t cry in front of the girls. She cries in the shower or in her mom’s bed, where her scent and reminders linger. No specific memory triggers her; it’s the bare absence.
When she watches old cell phone videos of her mom, she laughs. “She knew how to have a good time,” she says after one. “There are days where I just think about her, and it’s like, Oh, wow.” When she looked at the calendar one month after her mother’s death, on the seventh day, it was like, oh, wow.
Jenny has tried to step into the role of the maternal figure and soften the impact of their mom’s death on Zoe and Sierra’s emotional health, schooling, and self-esteem. “I ask them every now and then, Okay, so how are you feeling, sister to sister, tell me, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, can you not?’” Jenny says. “I don’t want them to be traumatized and I don’t know about it. I told them that I want them to do counseling, but they’re like, No, no, no. They’ll say, ‘I’m fine, I cried the other day.’”
Sitting by their apartment complex’s pool with striped chaise lounges and recliners, Zoe and Sierra are hushed but thoughtful. Zoe breaks one quiet beat with a giggle. She remembers how her mommy used to “like, literally yell to communicate with us in the house. She’d be like, ‘Zoe come here’ or call me in her room to do something for her or get something for her. And I’m like, just text me.”
She points to the sky. “She’s up there having the best time with her mom and her other sister, watching down on us.”
No single moment has been harder to get through than the next for the girls, “but some days when I think about it, it’s like, oh, we’re going to be celebrating Christmas without her,” Zoe says, “Thanksgiving without her, her birthday, Mother’s Day. It’s like I’m not ready for it.”
She forgot her last words to her mom but remembers lying next to her that Wednesday night. “I was still getting over being sick too,” she says, “and I fell asleep for like two minutes and she tapped me and told me, ‘You have to go in your room cause you might get more sick,’ and I went in my room and I went to sleep and that was the last time.”
For Sierra, that last moment with her mom is a cherished one. “I called her when she was in the hospital,” she says softly, her feet pressed against a white patio table, rocking up and down. She pulls at the tips of her braids.
“Did she say anything?” Zoe asks. They’ve never talked about it.
“I asked her some questions,” Sierra says, her scrunched lips twist left, then right. “I don’t really remember what, but she was like nodding her head, she didn’t talk.”
“Because she had her mask on?” Zoe says. A ventilator was over their mother’s nose and mouth.