The Silence After Her Song: A Reflection on My Mother’s Passing The Silence After Her Song

The Silence After Her Song: A Reflection on My Mother’s Passing

The Silence After Her Song

by Kateb Shunnar

Fourteen years ago August 2011 , the world fell silent. The music that carried me through my life the voice, the wisdom, the laughter, the prayer of my mother Marva ceased to play, and I was left standing in the stillness, unsure whether to scream or listen harder. That moment was not merely the death of a woman; it was the departure of a sacred presence, the severing of a spiritual umbilical cord that had fed my soul long past childhood. Losing my mother was not just one of the hardest moments of my life; it was number two on a list only the universe itself could understand. It was like watching the lighthouse that guided me dim slowly until only darkness remained. I was caught in that black sea, adrift, no longer knowing where the shore was, or if there even was one.

Grief doesn't arrive all at once like a wave. No, it's more like fog quiet, creeping, heavy and it settled into my bones before I had time to understand what was happening. My world stopped. Clocks still ticked, birds still sang, people still smiled and moved about their days, but I was floating in a void, absent from time, abandoned by gravity.

The loss was not only emotional it was metaphysical. My spirit felt untethered, suspended above a body too weak to move, too stunned to cry for long, and too shattered to even feel anger. I was not simply mourning a person. I was mourning a universe that lived inside her one that had revolved around me, lifted me, loved me without condition or pause.

There are people we love, and then there are those who are love itself to us. My mother was not simply a figure in my life she was the very container of my becoming. She held the echo of my first cry, the rhythm of my laughter, the tears I could not shed alone. Her prayers were wings that lifted my weary soul when I didn’t even know I was falling. Her text messages simple things like “I love you, son” or “Have a beautiful, blessed day” were more than words.

They were soul-food, invisible medicine that kept my spirit nourished. And now, without them, I am hungry in a way no food could satisfy.

I miss her in the small places: in the sunlight that lands on the kitchen table, in the empty sound of morning when no call comes to say “Good morning, baby.” I miss her in the evenings when frustration sits heavy on my shoulders and there is no mother’s meal to remind me that the world is still kind. I miss the simple holiness of her voice. I miss the way she would say a short prayer, not because I asked, but because she knew—even before I knew that I needed one. I miss the emails that said, “What did you write today?” as if the act of writing were not just my calling, but her breath made visible through me.

I did not know that grief had layers, seasons, echoes. That even after fourteen years, it could sneak in like a shadow at midday and wrap itself around me as tightly as it did the day I stood at her graveside. As I sit here with tears washing down my face, exhausted from the weight of remembrance, I realize I am not just mourning her absence I am mourning her presence in every moment that now feels incomplete. The silence is deafening. It is the silence after her song.

She was a melody written in light. Marva, my mother, was not loud, but she was strong in a way only angels and oak trees understand. She loved with a fierceness that didn’t demand attention but moved mountains in the spirit. Her love was like rain on drought-stricken ground subtle, steady, and life-saving. She didn’t shout her wisdom. She whispered it into the corners of my days, like a sacred wind that only the heart can hear.

And now I am left to walk the days without that wind at my back. But still… sometimes, when I’m still enough, I feel it. In a word that comes to mind just when I need it. In the way I remember to pray when fear knocks. In the rhythm of my writing, when something divine passes through my pen and I realize: she’s still with me. Not as she was, but as she is a presence that lives on in the corridors of my spirit.

The pain is still here. The loneliness sharp. The ache of missing a mother is a unique suffering, like losing the roots of a tree while still being expected to bloom. But it is in this hollow space that the Creator whispers most clearly. Grief, I’ve come to understand, is not the absence of love it is its continuation. It is love transformed, stretching itself across dimensions, still reaching, still holding, even when the arms are gone. Marva’s love didn’t stop. Her voice didn’t vanish. It moved into the unseen, into the language of dreams, into the feathers that fall from the sky for no reason, into the sunrise that feels like her smile.

I know what it means to long for a mother’s prayer, especially now, when the world feels cold and heavy, when confusion clouds the path and everything seems uncertain. A mother’s prayer is not simply a wish it is a covering, a spiritual umbrella that shields you from the downpour of despair. And when that covering is no longer spoken aloud, you feel the rain in a new way. But I believe her prayers still cover me. That even in the silence, she speaks. Even in the stillness, she intercedes. Even from beyond, she is mothering my soul.

In moments like this, I write to remember. I write to mourn. I write to reconnect with the divine thread that ties her spirit to mine. And in the middle of this solemn remembering, this sacred ache, a poem arrived  gentle, as if carried by her own hand:

She Whispers in the Wind

She whispers in the wind at dawn,

In silence, still, her love lives on.

A mother’s voice, though hushed by death,

Still carries in my every breath.

She touched the stars, then touched my face,

And left behind her holy grace.

Though flesh may fail and time erase,

Her spirit walks in every place.

When sorrow breaks my voice with cries,

I see her prayer behind my eyes.

She never left just changed her form

A flame that flickers through the storm.

She whispers in the wind, so light

Her lullabies become my fight.

And though I walk this world alone,

Her soul has made my heart her home.

I don’t pretend to be strong today. I am broken in a sacred way. But I’ve learned that in our brokenness, the light gets in. And maybe that’s what my mother was always preparing me for. Not a life without her but a life with her within me. I see her in the resilience she passed down, in the words I write when I have nothing left but faith, in the way I still find myself whispering prayers that sound suspiciously like hers.

Kateb Marva & Earraina

Grief will visit again. It always does. It wears different clothes sometimes it’s sadness, sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s just silence. But now I know how to welcome it like a familiar guest. Not to be feared, but to be honored. Because grief is love’s echo, and echoes only exist when something holy has been spoken.

To anyone missing their mother, I say this: you are not alone in the ache. The absence may feel like a black hole, but inside that darkness, something eternal glows.

The Creator never leaves us comfortless. And the prayers of a mother especially a spiritual mother are too powerful to end at death. They move through time like rivers underground, feeding the roots of our becoming in ways we may never fully understand. If today feels heavy, if tears fall like summer storms, let them fall. Let them cleanse the soil of your soul. And when they pass, listen. You just might hear her whisper in the wind.

Kateb Shunnar