After my mother died, time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. Days blurred into nights. Weeks folded into each other. I remember standing in my childhood bedroom weeks after her funeral, staring at the same pale blue walls she had helped me paint when I was sixteen, and feeling like I was standing inside a memory rather than a real place. People kept telling me that grief followed stages—that there would be shock, then denial, then anger, and eventually acceptance. None of that matched my reality. For me, grief arrived like a sudden crash on a highway: loud, violent, and disorienting, leaving everything in ruins before I even understood what had happened. One moment, my life was normal. I was juggling graduate school, part-time work, and weekend calls with my mom about recipes and thrift-store finds. The next moment, she was gone. My mother, Claire, died on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when a drunk driver ran a red light and slammed into her car. She never had time to react. There was no warning, no goodbye. Just absence. The last message she ever sent me was about a ridiculous oversized sweater she had found and insisted I would love. I still have that text.