Today marks six months since Mum died. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Day to day, I’m mostly OK; just working or hanging around. I seem to be wasting most of my time off just playing game or watching YouTube. I do feel like I’m rattling around in this empty house.

Other times, I find myself really missing her. I went to see Vienna Teng for the first time in years a couple weeks back, and I was afraid I was going to lose it if she sang “The Tower”, because Mum was very much The Tower, “the one who survives by making the lives of others worthwhile”.

Sure enough, she did sing it, and I did get a catch in my throat, when she sang the part “I need not to need/I’ve always been the tower” and remembered how much she hated needing me to help her, after her strokes, but I was able to hold it together and enjoy the rest of the show.

When a sailing ship has to sail against the wind, it can’t do so directly. It has to approach the wind diagonally zig-zag fashion; this is called tacking. Occasionally, if the ship isn’t trimmed right, or if the ship is turned onto the next tack before it has gathered enough speed, it will be “caught in irons,” stuck, with its sails shivering uselessly. The only thing the crew can do is back the sails, get back on the previous tack, gather way, and try again.

I feel like I’ve been caught in irons, and am just starting to make way.