One Cup At A Time

*TW: Contains brief language and references to addiction

I’ve never liked the taste of coffee. Too bitter. But this morning, I needed something with a little more bite than tea. Something to carry me over the finish line of a day I’ve dreaded for the last eleven years: going through Mom’s belongings.

As the scorched taste of Louisiana chicory slid down the back of my throat, I couldn’t help but smile and think of her. Coffee was always her thing, and the stronger the better. It was usually Colombian roast accompanied by a splash of milk, a packet of Sweet N Low, and -of course- a Big Tex cinnamon roll. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a recovering alcoholic: you find something else to numb the reality of all the people you’ve pushed away over the years. At least, I’m sure that’s what she used it for, or maybe -like me- she used it to just get through something she’d been dreading. What was she dreading? Only Heaven–or Hell–knows now.

I got a call exactly two years ago, while dawn was just a flicker of light on the horizon, that my mom had died. In the two minutes it’d taken the ambulance to get from my uncle’s house -where she was living- to the hospital, she’d stopped breathing. Her heart gave out and her whole being- gone. While the world could care less about one person wiped out of existence, my world shattered. The woman who shaped my entire life, in some form of another, was no longer anything but a memory.

Mom and I had a complicated relationship. The years of my childhood when she was gone felt like she was already dead, but this hurt worse than anything I’d felt back then. It really wasn’t quite a shock that she’d died, we’d been expecting it for nine years since her diagnosis. It was just so sudden. I woke up thirty minutes earlier to a call that she was being readmitted to the hospital and I heard her voice on the line. I was so annoyed that I’d been woken up for what was another trip to the hospital -her fourth in the last three months- while I was handling an infant and just finding out I was pregnant again. Maybe the guilt is why I remember not being able to catch my breath, like I’d just run a marathon and collapsed at the finish line. Maybe I had: the last nine years being a sprint from one doctor’s appointment to the next dialysis treatment, while also trying to forgive her for chasing her next boyfriend or her next high during the earlier years. In that moment, I couldn’t tell if I was grieving the mother who had just died or the woman she should’ve been all those years ago.

I shook the memory loose, like trying to get a coffee stain out of a favorite shirt. Two years gone, and still it hit me in the chest when I thought of her voice on the line, weak and tired, and my own irritation at being woken up. Funny how death has a way of rearranging priorities overnight — suddenly the things I complained about mattered, or maybe they didn’t matter at all. I set the memory aside, slid off the couch, and took a deep breath. Today wasn’t about grief, exactly. It was about sorting. About facing the evidence of her life without her in it. And maybe, just maybe, finding a little humor in the fact that it all began with a cup of coffee.

I stepped toward the front door, careful not to trip over the lingering ghosts of old slippers and Christmas presents she’d yet to open, and wondered if she had left me a sign. Or maybe just a warning: “Don’t touch that mug. It’s the only thing keeping me sane.” I smiled. That sounded like her. That damn cup. Her plain navy blue mug sat in the sink, brown ring clinging stubbornly to the bottom like a tiny monument to mornings past. I picked it up, turning it in my hands, and imagined her fingers wrapped around it, shaking just enough to make me worry. I felt like screaming, hurling the mug across the room, letting it shatter the way my childhood had — broken fragments of the moments she should’ve been there for me. My grip tightened on the handle, chipping the decade-old ceramic, until my husband’s voice pulled me back from the void between nostalgia and all the memories we never got. A breath hitched in my throat, the scorched taste of coffee rising with it, and I let the tears fall as I finally loosened my grip.

I set my cup down and finally made my way to that room where she spent her last three weeks of life, setting the mug down again and wiping my palms on my jeans - the only way to ignore the way silence pressed in on me. No CPAP machine humming, no clatter of her bumping into the counter, no smart-ass comment thrown in my direction. Just a house full of her absence.

I spotted her old charger on the table — the one for that blue flip phone she refused to give up. “The buttons are real,” she’d always say, tapping at them like a stubborn pianist. Her boyfriend kept the phone after she died, claimed it made him feel close to her. I didn’t argue, but seeing that charger now made something twist in my chest.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my own phone, my thumb hovering over the contact I’d labeled Momma. Two voicemails. I’d listened to them more times than I’d admit. I pressed play on the first one — the messy one, the one where her voice melted into itself like she couldn’t decide what word came next. “Chastity. Peyton. Cori Beth. Gramma. Eden. Chasti-” was all I heard, her voice barely distinguishable from her tears. The slurring reminded me of those nights she’d go looking for a fight.

I closed my eyes, and for a second it felt like I was right back in every conversation where I tried to figure out which version of her I was listening to. The sober one? The high one? The lonely one? The one who loved me? Or the one who couldn’t quite remember how?

Before I could second-guess myself, I tapped the second voicemail — the one I kept for the days I needed to remember her softness.

“Chas, I swear this ruku bullshit hates me,” she complained in that exaggerated, irritated tone. “I need the password for your Disney+. Call me back.” I laughed — actually laughed — in the middle of a kitchen she’d spent years filling with chaos, coffee, and crumbs.

“Roku, Mom,” I whispered to the empty room. “It’s called Roku.” Hearing her voice again made everything inside me ache and soften at the same time. That was her. Infuriating, exhausting, hilarious, unforgettable. A woman who could break my heart and make me laugh in the same breath.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket, the bitterness rising in my throat — coffee and guilt melding together like dark chocolate and espresso. No matter how far I ran from her shadow, she could still reach me through a three-second mispronunciation. And of course she could. Even from the grave, she’d find a way — not with some poetic sign or ghostly whisper, but with a voicemail complaining about “ruku.” Figures.

I wiped my face with the inside of my sweater, exhaling like I’d been holding my breath for two years. My eyes drifted to the box on the stove, the one stuffed full of mismatched mugs she never let anyone throw away. Her entire life was like that — nothing matched, everything chipped, but somehow she loved it all anyway.

Maybe that was the soft part of her I only noticed once she wasn’t here to defend it.

My hand hovered over the box, then drifted to the counter where one mug sat alone — her navy one, the very same I’d nearly thrown across the room that morning. The brown ring inside had dried into a perfect circle, stubborn and permanent, like it refused to forget her.

I lifted it again, lighter this time. Maybe because for the first time all morning, it didn’t feel like a weapon. It felt like… her. Chipped, mismatched, slightly crooked, but still trying.

I traced the rim with my thumb, feeling the tiny imperfections she’d left behind, and I realized it didn’t matter how much of her life I sorted through or how many voicemails I replayed. This mug — simple, stubborn, bitter, just like her coffee — carried everything I needed to hold onto. Her chaos, her humor, her attempts at love, all wrapped up in one familiar circle.

For a moment, I let myself just sit there, the warmth of the coffee and the weight of the mug grounding me. It was enough.

I set the mug back on the counter, letting the familiar weight settle between my hands and the memory of her. The kitchen smelled faintly of her usual Colombian blend and something else I couldn’t name — maybe cinnamon, maybe just her. I took a slow breath, feeling the bitter edge of coffee and grief swirl together like dark chocolate and espresso, and for the first time all morning, I didn’t feel like I had to outrun either of them. She was gone, but she was still here, in the mug, in the mess, in the laughter I could almost hear.

I smiled, a little crooked, a little sad, and whispered, “Okay, Mom. Let’s get through this — one cup at a time.”

And somehow, as always, it came back to coffee.