My mom died. I remember the moment I realized those three harrowing words were to become a staple piece in my vocabulary. I was lying in bed, thoughts racing as they did nightly in those months following her wave of the white flag against cancer, and those words kept repeating as if they were practicing themselves to seem normal. Trying to parade as if they’d always been. But they hadn’t always been and now life would be divided into parts. Before my mom died. After my mom di