While my sister Holly and I waited for the police, she rifled through our mother’s desk, searching for clues as to why she hadn’t come home the previous night. Exhausted, I propped myself on an armchair my mother had acquired when moving out of my father’s house nearly a year ago.

In her late 20s, Holly had a family of her own, children who were right now in her mother-in-law’s care. I was 17 and shared this apartment with my mother every other week, per her custody agreement with my father.

Never once had she not come home.

My mother was many things — among them a librarian who loved Mozart and a parent who made her child eat her broccoli. She was an adulteress who left my father for a man who wouldn’t commit, leaving her aching and ashamed. But she was also stuck inside a depression she couldn’t seem to climb out of, riddled with worsening anxiety, and refused to seek treatment, despite my father’s urging.

More than anything, my mother was a woman who wanted to build a life of her own, but so far it wasn’t working. The previous summer I had interrupted a suicide attempt, which is how I now knew, leaning against that armchair, that she was probably dead.

I had waited for her the previous night, dancing around the living room and thumbing books on her bookshelf. But hours passed and my heart rate quickened as I recalled her goodbye that morning. She had crawled into my bed and held my teenage body like a child. Half-asleep, I had thought, “This is so nice.” When she left the apartment for work, she placed a $20 bill on her desk next to a note that said, “I love you, Mary.”

It was a stark contrast to the bickering she and I had become accustomed to as we navigated my adolescence and the dissolution of her marriage, and that morning I was hopeful things might get better. But when night fell with no word from her, I had pieced it together: Her gestures were of finality, not a new beginning.

“I think my life’s about to change,” I told a friend on the phone. My speedometer clocked 100 driving to my father’s, where I lay on the couch leaving increasingly distressed messages on my mother’s answering machine. Eventually it was just “Mama, Mama,” amid currents of sobbing.

I loved my mother more than anything. But once I had reached high school, her presence became unbearable in that way teenage daughters experience their mothers when they’re trying to establish their own patch of sunlight. It made everything she did, from chewing her bagel to wearing a short skirt, seem embarrassing.

“You’re so hateful,” she would say.

I tried to hide my disdain, but she could sense it. In her sadness, she sought signs from others that confirmed her worst thoughts about herself.

When a mother dies by suicide amid all that adolescent push and pull, it can be really difficult to separate culpability from normal, if sometimes callous, teenage behavior.

I agreed that her suicide wasn’t my fault when people reassured me of this fact. But internally, I blamed myself and who I was at the very core. Rotten. Thorny. Unlovable. Mean.

Holly arrived at my father’s early in the morning. We returned to Mom’s and called the police.

From the desk, third drawer down, Holly extracted three items: a book about how to defeat depression; a folder containing my mother’s will; and a note: “Please scatter my ashes under a rosebush.”

My sister looked at me, the color drained from her face.

I have never really liked roses. I found them garish, the petals sparse and curled like burned paper.

My mother planted a rosebush by our garage when I was a child, and I hated its scraggly foliage and pale pink flowers. I thought it was the ugliest thing blooming over the flat acre of grass and garden where I spent an idyllic childhood, thanks to my mother’s tending.

She gave me fleshy tomatoes that sprang from our North Carolina clay. She gave me a jasmine vine that entwined with our deck, waxy yellow blooms that burst open with fragrance in summer when the cicadas trilled at a fever pitch.

My mother read to me endlessly, words rumbling in her chest as I nestled against it. When I was older and Holly had left for college, my mother and I would lie together in the rope hammock suspended among the pines in the backyard. Soft brown needles lined the ground under our feet as we padded down the path to climb inside, turning the pages of library books as we swayed, limbs intermingling, dust jackets crinkling.

We would travel together to visit her mother, and I would get fidgety with the time it took for them to walk the garden. My grandmother talked about her roses, her nandina, her gardenia, her voice thick southern prose. I was jealous of their murmurings, their closeness. It seemed to encroach on mine and my mother’s, usually so private, so conspiratorial — us against the world.

Like my mother, I experienced mental health challenges from a young age, and she offered refuge and support.

The morning my sister found my mother’s note, I discovered a clump of tissues next to my mother’s bed. I touched them to my tongue, trying to absorb the last bit of her into me. When the police officer arrived, he told us they had found my mother’s body in a nearby hotel, and immediately reality became a bad dream.

An adult now, I live on a mountain in western North Carolina with my husband and our two sons. My patch of garden is chaos — my grandmother would disapprove, but I know Mom wouldn’t mind.

The last time my mother and I traveled together was on a college visit to these mountains the summer before she died. We had driven the Blue Ridge Parkway and eaten at a restaurant where marijuana wafted through the air. Barefoot in a stream with bouquets of rhododendron in bloom around us and smooth-worn stones beneath our feet, my mother told me her soul was the happiest it had been in a long while.

Now, by my front door, wineberries form a thicket behind a hobbled apple tree. My youngest child and I pluck the red thimbles on summer mornings. Lavender blooms sideways, reaching out for the sun from under a patch of red raspberries that grow rampant along with a smattering of purple-budded weeds, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, lamb’s ear, irises. In the winter, when the trees are bare, you can see an expanse of mountain ridge to the south.

My mother would have loved this life. She would have loved my husband and our gorgeous feral children. I wish she would have stayed, seen this place, the way it looks when things get a bit easier.

When we first moved here six years ago, I ripped out a rosebush with light-pink blooms like my mother’s. I wanted more space for tomatoes, I told my husband. Really, though, I wanted to exile the daily reminder of my mother. That primal guilt remained, cold and punishing, waking me at night to ruminate.

I know firsthand the impact that unchecked grief and anxiety can have on a family. Once it became clear that mine was affecting not only me, but the people I love most, I sought the kind of treatment I believe would have also helped my mother.

Therapy meant revisiting the scenes leading up to my mother’s death until they didn’t hurt as much, and cultivating compassion for the teenage girl experiencing them. The guilt will never go away entirely. I am not “healed.” But I have learned how to regard myself with more and more tenderness, like a mother would.

My mother and I would be friends now, I imagine. The ache of annoyance that resonated so loudly in my body would have eased; she would have found her way. Perhaps she would work at the town library, a building of river stone where Lulu, the children’s librarian, directs my boys to perfect-for-them books.

Last summer at my local nursery, I was greeted by a single bushy flower: the blooms velvety, thick, purpled and plush. After finding the plant I had come for, I circled back, stuck my nose inside a bloom and inhaled. A rose? I looked at the tag and bought it.

This winter, 20 years after my mother’s death, my sister and I scattered the tiniest amount of her ashes under the rosebush I planted precisely for this reason. As we did so, I looked around at the disorder of my garden and flushed with shame.

It was only a moment, though, before I reminded myself how much my mother would love to be here to witness the beauty of my imperfect, messy life. At rest, in peace, underneath the roses.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Mary Pembleton is a writer in Asheville, N.C.

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

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