Love is the Only Subject
2025 marks five years since my mom died—and yet, the ache has not softened.
The world has spun through wars, upheaval, and political theatre, but my mind still drifts, again and again, to the quiet fact: I just really miss my mom.
I cried—plenty—from the moment she died and for many months afterward. But I was busy comforting others, helping them grieve. I buried my own pain beneath studies, long walks, and endless projects. Almost a year after her death, I launched a podcast—one of the healthiest distractions I’ve ever had. The idea, concept, and prep were all done in that blur between winter and spring, and it launched July 1st, 2021—just shy of the one-year mark. She died on July 11th, 2020.
Since then, I’ve kept going. In 2023, I started an online publication—another promise kept to her, another healthy outlet, another means of keeping busy. The deeper truth is that I was also distracting myself. I was processing through work, email, editing, and doing.
When my mom died, I had been taking care of her. Her health had drastically declined, and she was bedridden, with nurses and personal care workers visiting daily unless she was readmitted to the hospital, usually for severe respiratory distress. This was during lockdowns in Canada due to COVID-19. I remember those phone calls from her medical team—tense, clinical conversations where I forced myself to sound calm, rational, and composed. Every time I hung up, I wanted to scream or cry. Often both.
She was intubated three times. She was a tough broad—a fighter. The third time, she never came back. A massive stroke while on the ventilator left her in a coma. That very morning, I was able to visit her in the ICU. We laughed, smiled, talked, and even communicated through a pen and pad, though her motor skills were badly weakened. It would be the last time we ever spoke.
While she was sick, and long before that, she would say to me: “Remember, Mathew, the world needs you—even if it doesn’t deserve you.”
I used to smile when she said it. After she died, those words became sacred. They anchored me when everything else fell apart.
I have not stopped, and I won’t. But I’ve realized now—five years later—that I need to pause. I need to cry, to laugh, to remember.
To mourn. To grieve. To recall her laugh, her voice, her humour, her love, her curiosity—her everything. I also need to make peace with what her absence means.
She won’t be at my wedding. She won’t meet my future children. She won’t see my birthdays or hold my hand in times of doubt. And still, I must keep going.
There is a strange peace in knowing we had no unfinished business. Nothing unsaid. Nothing left hanging. Her love was total. So was mine.
And still, the void is immense. Losing a mother changes you—it pushes you into despair, then into resilience, then into something more stoic.
You adapt to life’s hardest truths. You carry them differently.
Love is the only subject. That’s what we called it—our little phrase—especially once she got sick. I was there when she needed me most, as she had always been there for me.
I know how proud of me she was. I know how proud she would be now, five years on.
I don’t think grief ever leaves us—it just changes shape. But love, the only subject, echoes still. Every project I finish, every challenge I face, every time I laugh or cry—I carry her with me.
I always will.