A gathering of jellyfish is called a smack.

I've been thinking a lot about jellyfish.

I see them mostly at night, when I'm restless and ready to go somewhere, anywhere but here — pushing through the brain fog and the earthly tenets I want to divorce myself from. I wish my heart could be with the ocean, reforming itself with the waves. 

There is a species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii that is, by all biological measures, immortal. When it ages, suffers damage, or faces the standard indignities of existence, it reverts back to its juvenile polyp state and starts over. Scientists call this transdifferentiation — a $40 word for the fact that this creature has found a way to begin again from the cellular level.

What a gift that is.

It's easy to underestimate the genuine ability to start over, to reorganize, and forget. For immortal jellyfish, the old information becomes the new structure, and they keep floating. I'm not sure that's possible for the rest of us, or at least, not for me. I feel things in the fibers of my mitochondria and try to dissect everything like an anatomy diagram. So I write the following with a heaviness I don't think people will understand.

My mother is dead, and I am different. 

The hands that are typing are still mine; the things I still care about are here. But the world seems dimmer, and I haven't the faintest idea of what would make it seem bright again. Because there is no forgetting her, there’s just adaptation and the slow biological crawl of continuing. 

I want to believe in God, but I'm at a loss. Because I mostly believe in dopamine and oxytocin and the way grief restructures neural pathways like a storm rerouting a river.

Because I do get it — she's dead — and I cannot stay in the past.

What I realized in her absence is that I underestimated my mother. The void of her has made me reflect on how she formed my soul, and how much her good opinion mattered. Personal successes seem a little less because I have no one to share them with who is more excited than I am. And devastations, tiny and huge, are now mine to carry, completely alone. 

At first, she was home in between hospital stays. Slowly, my gut unfurled to something I couldn't say out loud — that she was never coming home at all.

People told me to have hope. I couldn't. I watched her lose it in real time, in small surrenders that only I seemed to see, and no one's optimism was going to override what I knew in my body. There's a particular loneliness in being right about something like that. In being told to feel differently than you do, and then being proven correct in the worst possible way.

She never came back. I was validated. I have never felt less like celebrating being right.

There were months of sadness that cannot be articulated well because time itself became different. Minutes became wins, surviving hours were victories, and then there was a backslide of some sort. An anniversary that made me feel sick, and a holiday that she loved would make me stay in bed all day.  

At work, I sobbed in my office and was told to see the chaplain. So I became more careful about how I presented myself, which eventually caused me to push the sadness down until it came vomiting back up on the worst Mother's Day of my life.

But in the minutiae of moving on, I remember the first day I laughed, heartily. 

I was at my mailbox after a bland day at work, flipping through the mail as I walked to my front door. I stopped, midway up the path.

My dead mom had won a sweepstakes prize, seven months after she was gone. She had to go down to an office to claim her winnings, emphasizing that this had to be in person for it to be valid. 

I laughed so hard at the optics that I started crying. Then I started crying-crying, and the fluster of emotion made me laugh even harder, and I fell in my front yard. When I eventually gathered myself, I went inside and brushed leaves out of my hair.

That laugh was not new. Just like the jellyfish, it was my mother, reorganized. The same cellular love, expressing itself differently now — not as her physical presence, but in her silliness. 

I knew grief to be slow. And it is — slow and geological, the kind of change that only reveals itself over millennia. But when joy returned, it was at velocity. It didn't knock or ask permission or wait for me to be ready.

Jellyfish haunt me because picturing the deep dark, unexplored blue makes me feel I could still find her. If I swish to the left or pivot to the right, maybe exploring one more inch of the abyss will produce a revelation to explain why all of this pain was worth it. 

When she was in home hospice, I sewed closed a rip in her favorite teddy bear. When I handed it back over to her, she softly exclaimed, " You fixed it!”

I think jellyfish are like that precious teddy bear, and me. Broken things can be reorganized and still hold, and they still have value in this world 

There’s no starting over, no forgetting her. 

But I have hope that I’m being reorganized.