I thought grief had already taken everything it could from me, until my mother’s final message shifted the ground beneath my feet again. In a single video, she shattered the story I’d grown up believing and handed me a new one—messier, truer, and somehow more full of love than I knew was possible. Standing there in my wedding dress, between the man I chose and the father I never knew I had, I realized this wasn’t my day falling apart. It was my life finally falling into place.
We delayed the ceremony, but we didn’t cancel it. I walked back down that aisle not as the girl who had lost her mother, but as the woman my mother had fought, in her own flawed way, to protect. My bouquet held her locket. My arm held Frank’s. My hand reached for Eric’s. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something simple, quiet, and overwhelming: I felt whole.
