I found Soph on an app. I met her at a red-lit wine bar in the West Village. She was exactly as pictured, except warmer, more aglow. Sheepish and charming, with a full laugh that I wanted to swallow for myself, she went in for a hug when I approached her.

I already knew she was Australian. Over text, I made her swear to explain in-person how she’d ended up here. It was the gray mush between Christmas and New Year’s, the only time New York feels like finding a quiet, unlocked bedroom at a party.

It matched my mood. Weeks earlier, I had gone through a breakup that upset me because it didn’t upset me. Heartbreak at 23, I decided, should have felt like a great medieval slaying. Like being cut open.

At the wine bar, Soph told me about how her father had met her mother, a born-and-raised New Yorker, when visiting from Sydney decades ago. Soph was here for a few months to spend time with her mother’s side of the family while on summer break from veterinary school. She hoped to move to the city in the fall, finally making good use of her dual citizenship.

“And your mom lives in Sydney now?” I asked.

“Well, she did,” Soph said. “We lost her a few years ago, actually.”

I almost asked her to repeat herself; I wanted to dissect her delivery. I couldn’t believe she had so effortlessly nailed a tone I had been chasing for the past three years.

In fact, I was so stunned that I told her something I normally saved for the sixth date, or the ninth, or never: I also had lost my mother. In a way. We were estranged.

I was good at being estranged from my mother, and I was good at making other people feel comfortable about our estrangement — but I was bad at talking about it. My mother was an alcoholic, and not the covert kind. She stole, lied and cheated. She spoke to me only with cruelty — until eventually, after my parents separated several years ago, I cut her off entirely.

I lived the adult life I did — with a job I loved, friends who loved me, and hobbies and interests and things that eventually my mother had none of — not despite our estrangement but because of it. I felt an obligation to be a kind of estrangement poster child. A living, breathing embodiment of, “Look, life goes on.”

I went to group therapy and solo therapy. I hosted a legendary Friendsgiving, where guests were required to bring a dish their mother might have prepared. I joked about mommy issues, with both irony and sincerity.

Still, it never stopped being hard. I owed no one an explanation, in theory, yet in practice I did.

I came out as gay often, but I came out as someone without a mother constantly. I never felt that I had the right shorthand. She was an unwell person, but for the first 18 years of my life she had been a beautiful, successful, sparkly person. She loved me fiercely. And then in only a matter of years she plummeted into a dark cave where none of us could follow.

How were you supposed to let anybody in again after such betrayal? I had no answer. Every day I understood addiction less.

“It’s not the same,” I said to Soph that first evening. Her mother had died from cancer. “I just mean that I also don’t have a mom. I don’t have my mom.”

“It’s absolutely the same,” Soph said.

And like everything else she told me, I believed her.

The next day I hosted a New Year’s Eve-Eve dinner party. We ate Caesar salad and French fries and leek soup and drank wine with funky paper labels. I told everyone that the day before I’d met someone sparkly.

On our second date, we walked 30 blocks uptown along the park to my apartment. Around Strawberry Fields, she said an injured bird has a fighting chance if it retains grip strength. She held her finger out to me, like a hooked talon, to demonstrate.

She would leave in March, so over the next few months, I broke all my own rules. Soph could see me twice in a week, then three times, then four. Soph could meet my friends. Soph could come to Tuesday trivia. We could be exclusive, but only until she left.

In coming to know Soph, I also came to know her mother. Here was her mother’s favorite cocktail bar, her favorite French bistro, her childhood neighborhood. Not only did Soph know New York at least as well as I did, but she knew it through her mother’s eyes. I envied the way she casually slotted her mother into everyday conversation, including and honoring her, as if it cost nothing.

“It’s different,” I said. “Your mom was sick.”

“Your mom is also sick though,” she told me.

I wondered what it would be like to honor my mother in the same way: to honor her with the kind of absolution we usually reserve for the dead. To mourn not who she had become but who she had once been — and not worry whether it was a grace she deserved.

And so I did exactly that: I tried to relearn how to talk about my mother. How to say that she was a professional chef by trade who had served powerful people in cities all over the country, including New York. That simultaneously she had been the kind of mother who paid her taxes, blanched her broccoli with good kosher salt, texted Bitmojis that said, “I’m So Proud of U!”

I started pointing out things that reminded me of her. Work clogs worn with dresses. Joan Osborne and Joni Mitchell. Any storefront that used to be a Dean & Deluca. I wished I knew even more — like where, so many years ago, our mothers could have passed each other on the street.

It was only then, as things go, that out in Arizona my mother entered the hospital for late-stage liver disease. First the doctors guessed she had two or three years. This became a month. I booked a flight for a week out. And then finally, as I took the subway to Queens to meet Soph’s grandmother, it became days.

My relationship with my mother was a movie I had put on pause to leave the room, only to return to find the credits playing.

“If you have something to say, now would be the time to come home,” my father said when I got off at the earliest stop I could, which happened to be at Citi Field. When Soph met me in the parking lot, I asked her, in so many words, and without the prepared speech I had hoped to give, to be my girlfriend.

The next day, I flew to Tucson. By the time my plane touched down, after two layovers, my mother was unconscious. I haven’t decided if this was her version of grace. I still don’t know what I would have said, besides “I love you” and “I forgive you” and “Why don’t I know your favorite cafe downtown? Why won’t I ever know?”

I have no choice but to believe this was enough.

Like love, there is not much to say about death that hasn’t been said before. It is often a lot of waiting around. I gathered with aunts and uncles and siblings as my mother lay in hospice. We discussed whether we liked the eggplant curry we had ordered better than the chicken. We played board games and listened to my mother’s breathing, quieting to hear it slow. Ultimately, we lost her too.

Lately, when I am asked how I’m doing (in that particular limp tone that we use for terrible things), I try on grief truisms like old jeans. I say I am fine — and also cut open. I am Little Red Riding Hood lost in the woods.

In my best moments, though, I am learning to use these questions to continue the work I started, which is to say: I use them to talk about my mother. I attempt past tense. She was beautiful and successful and sparkly. She took her chardonnay with ice.

At the end of each day, on the phone with my girlfriend 14 hours in the future, I ask her questions.

“Did you know — ?” I ask with urgency, about the smell of death, about old voice mail messages, about all matters of grief.

“Yes, I know,” she always says.

She says she likes the idea that someone only dies the last day someone says their name. I like this truism best of all.

She promises me that we have forever to master talking about it. I think we must spend forever trying.

Caitlin McCormick is a writer who lives in New York.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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