Have I Made Peace with My Mortality? A Reflection Born of Loss

The day I lost my mother, it felt like everything inside me collapsed. She wasn’t just my mother—she was my confidante, my teacher, my emotional anchor, the one person who knew me in ways no one else could. I thought I wouldn’t survive a single day without her. But I did. And then another day came, and another. Survival has a way of feeling both miraculous and cruel.

I had to face a truth I didn’t want to: she was gone. No amount of denial could rewrite it. All I had left were memories, mostly tucked away in my head. Her photographs on my phone became something I avoided. Whenever her face flashed on the screen, I’d scroll past as quickly as I could. I still don’t fully know why. Maybe it is too painful, or maybe looking means reopening the wound again.

Defining Life Through Responsibility

Long before my mother passed, I had set a strange marker in my mind. I used to think: when my youngest daughter turns eighteen, I’ll feel my responsibilities are done. Not because I don’t love my children—love is the reason I carry the weight of those responsibilities. But in my head, they are my purpose, my duty. And once those duties will be fulfilled, I feel there will be nothing else I need to hold on for.

That thought has never left me. Even now, years later, I measure my life in terms of responsibility, not desire. The idea of living beyond that milestone feels unnecessary. For many, such a thought might sound bleak. To me, it feels honest. 

There are questions in life that come to all of us not as casual conversations, but as echoes of something deeper—questions that demand honesty from within. One such question has lingered for me: Have I made peace with my mortality?

The answer is not a simple yes or no. It lives in a space between resignation and release, between memory and freedom.

When Fear of Death Loses Its Power

After my mother’s death, something shifted. My own mortality stopped being frightening. It’s not that I want death, but the panic, the dread, the clinging—it’s gone. There’s a freedom in that, though it’s not a freedom I ever sought.

It feels like the strings have been cut. No invisible ties pulling me toward life, no anchors weighing me down. When people talk about mortality, I don’t tense up the way I used to. I feel oddly neutral, almost desensitized.

I sometimes wonder if it’s grief that did this, or if it’s the recognition that nothing—not even love, not even the strongest bond—can keep us from the inevitable. Once you’ve walked through that truth, it’s hard to fear what’s waiting for you.

What Peace Really Means

So, have I made peace with my mortality? In some ways, yes. But it’s not the kind of peace people often imagine. It’s not a serene acceptance where every day feels like a gift. It’s not joy at the thought of endings. It’s more like this: a soft shrug, a quiet readiness.

Peace, for me, is knowing I don’t need to run from the thought of death anymore. I don’t need to build walls against it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. I don’t wake up every morning thinking about it, but if the thought enters, it doesn’t rattle me. It sits beside me, and I let it.

This peace isn’t pretty, and it isn’t poetic. It’s blunt, shaped by grief and survival. And yet, it’s real.

This shift is not born from philosophical study alone. It is shaped by lived experience, by a sense of profound loss, and by seeing firsthand how fragile our existence truly is. Once the most intimate ties are severed, the rest of life begins to feel strangely lighter. The fear of one’s own ending has diminished because, in a way, I have already witnessed the ending of something greater, loosing my mother was that end to me.

So, Have I Made Peace?

Yes, but in my own way, I have made peace with mortality. That peace is fragile yet real, quiet yet steadfast. It is not born of denial but of living fully in the time that remains—neither clinging too tightly nor pushing too far away.

My Final Thoughts

Mortality is no longer a dark figure lurking in the background of my life. It’s simply part of the landscape. I don’t claim to have transcended fear entirely, but I don’t wrestle with it anymore. I’ve learned that the hardest goodbyes teach us something paradoxical: that life ends, but also, that ending itself is survivable—at least for those left behind.

And maybe that’s where my peace with mortality comes from. Not from philosophy, not from books, not from meditation—but from lived pain, from loss, from the strange freedom that comes when the strings that once tied you to this world loosen on their own.

If life is a borrowed breath, then peace with mortality is simply learning how to exhale without fear.

Share your thoughts, please.