Everyone knows the early days of grief are the hardest, but when your parent dies, when your mom or dad leaves this life, you have to continue on past those early days. You have to keep going when the funeral is over and the friends and family go home and return to their lives.

Around that time, after my mother died in 2018, I overheard a conversation in which one person said to another that we are all forgotten within two to three generations. This was like a punch in the gut. I could never forget my mom, but it started to feel like people around me did.

Most people think of grief in terms of just those early days, how grief is shown on television, when someone receives news of the death and the ensuing funeral activities commence. After that, it seems as if everyone goes back to work and the world keeps turning. Television doesn’t often show us long grief or accurate grief.

You are the one who has been left behind. We, the grievers, the bereaved, we continue to look around ourselves, trying to see this new world without our lost loved one in it.

This is when it can happen, this extra painful part of grief that we should talk about, just in case it happens to you. People will forget. They will move on. It will seem like people you know no longer acknowledge or openly remember your mom or your dad after they pass away.

Just a few months after my mother died the sympathy cards stopped coming. Most people stopped saying her name out loud. Apparently they didn’t realize that I still needed hugs or comfort or someone to sit with me when it felt like my heart was folding in on itself.

She died toward the end of the summer, and by the fall it felt like people had stopped talking about her, as if she had stopped being a part of life. And although I did understand that she was gone, that she technically was no longer part of the living world, she was still very much a part of my life. I continue to talk to my children about their Grammy, as she liked to be called, (“Grammy, like the award”, she said when her first grandchild was born), and hope that they can remember her.

Whether a person lives for eight months or 80 years, they carve out spaces in our hearts, our homes, and everywhere they go during their time on earth. When they die, the uniquely shaped spaces they created are left behind, and nothing else can properly fill them.

Memories remain in these holes. We can sense our loved ones in old familiar places. I can see my mother sitting at my kitchen table or in the passenger seat of my car. A pair of her winter gloves are in my passenger door storage compartment, where they must have been tucked away and forgotten during her last visit. That was Christmas 2017, the last time I saw her before she died. I want her to come back and need gloves. If I leave them there in the door, they reserve that seat as hers. She was there.

Our lost loved ones put down roots and established places for themselves in our lives and in the world. After a lifetime of lovingly carving out space, putting down roots, and making things grow, your mother’s or father’s absence is felt deeply because you are still existing in that space, holding on to those same roots. Your lost parent touched certain points of your life and helped shape who you are. Your life and theirs might be interwoven so thoroughly that their mark on your life can never be removed.

You might think of it this way. Each one of these marks, or touch points, that your parent made in your life has become a star in the sky, and you are a constellation. Ursa Major is the Great Bear because of all of the little stars that make up the whole. When you look up at the night sky, there are stars only you notice first. Your eyes are drawn to them. These are the shapes of your constellations, and often others might not be able to see them, or at least not at first.

I doubt any of us who are grieving would choose to completely forget our parent if given the chance. What if we were offered the chance to be done with grief by simply pressing a button? If we press the button, we would forget that our parent ever existed and extinguish the pain of our grief. I don’t think I could do it. I would rather keep my grief than forget. Many of us wouldn’t press the button. We want to keep our lost one’s place at the table, to keep them in the conversation.

My great grandmothers were Zofia and Bronislawa, and they were married to my great grandfathers Marcin and Marcel. I know very little about them, and so maybe what I overheard about being forgotten in three generations is true. Or maybe they have stars in my sky, too. Instead of the forgotten ones, they are the ones I didn’t get a chance to know.

While I can’t bear to acknowledge that in two or three generations my mom will be essentially forgotten, I know that life continues moving. All things die, and the world keeps going. I suppose all we can do is shine brightly while we are here and keep putting one foot in front of the other. My mother did shine, and now she is the star in my heart.

It often seems that to others my mother’s life has been reduced to shallow footprints on sand, that will so easily wash away on the incoming tide. In the months and years following your parent’s death, it might truly seem as if others have forgotten your lost person, too. They don’t carry the carefully packaged trove of memories that make you smile and cry at the same time. Other people might see the footprints that wash away. They may not see your stars, but it doesn’t mean that they do not still shine.