I kept the condolence cards after my mother’s death.  Every one of them. I saved the Facebook post announcing her passing, with all the comments from close and distant friends. The notes lit my darkest hour. I still can’t give them up.  I may be buried with them.

So many people reached out after she died.

The people I grew up with, from home,  talked about her sweetness, liveliness, directness, and sense of humor. “We all loved her along with you,” they said.  “We will miss her too.”

Friends who only knew me through my mother, talked about our closeness. “You loved her. She loved you We saw it,” they said.

People who barely knew me wrote, too. In our social media age, there were many, in all corners of the world. “We may not know you well, but we know death.  We join you on this path. We are you,” they said.One of our fears  is that death will erase us and those we love.  Gone, gone without a trace.

Condolences prove no one is lost. When one of us dies, we feel our connection through our shared mortality  We form a net of memories, capturing the deceased one’s mark on the world. Their stories live among us. It isn’t the same as having them here, but it is a trace.

A lovely person asked a group of us if it’s ever too late to send condolences. She learned of an acquaintance’s passing, months after the fact. It was someone she liked very much, in a town far away. She never met the family members. Is it too late to send condolences, she asked?  If it appropriate  since the family doesn’t know me?

Write, we told her. It is never too late.  And, in the end, none of us are strangers.