Grief on a loved one's birthday feels like a different kind of loss. Sure, you'll get the same feelings of loss and thoughts flooding your mind about all the things they've missed, but it feels different. I can't really put it into words all that well because I'm going through the same feelings right now as I write this on September 14^th.

My mom passed away a week before Thanksgiving in 2015. She was pronounced brain dead two days earlier. It's still hard. The grief comes in waves, and I can be smiling and happy one moment and the next my anxiety gets a hold of me, and I'm sobbing. There were so many things I wish I could tell my mom or ask her. I can ask now, but I feel as if I'm speaking into oblivion. The hardest part about going through her birthday as if it's just another day is having all those thoughts I had running through my head the day she died, run through my head with perfect recall. I see everything all over again, and it hurts so bad.

At some point, the thoughts stop or slow down, but only for a moment. Everything I thought or felt during that week is brought up all over again in my head. Everything I did comes back with perfect recall. It's as if I'm watching a movie screen of my life through my eyes during only those moments. The day before she was pronounced brain dead, I visited her. She was talking to me, and we were watching a couple of movies (I didn't have a job at the time, and I wasn't in school, so I spent the day there with her). During the movie Brave (my mother loved children's films and sometimes preferred to watch those over other films), there's a part where Merida is worried she was too late to save her mom and that now she's stuck as a bear forever. I never cried during that movie, but during that part, I cried. I felt that I was losing my mom in the same way Merida thought she was losing her mom. After my mom died, I couldn't watch that movie for a good while, and there are still many movies that I can't watch without crying. That day I spent with my mom felt like I wasn't going to see her again. I picked my brothers up from school that day and considered going back to see my mom. I didn't. That's my biggest regret when it comes to my brothers and my mom. They hadn't seen her in a couple of weeks.

The grief comes in waves; it always will. Many people tell you it gets better, but it doesn't; you just have good days or awful ones (today is a particularly bad day for me because I can barely write this without having tears clouding my vision). The only thing I can think of to help ease the pain is to spend your time with family or people that will make you happy or smile. The death of loved ones is especially hard when you were very close to them.