What They Left Behind, and the Lessons That Move Me Forward

My Accountability Angels Make Me Better in Their Absence

My mom passed away on February 26th, 2026.

Carol Francis Coulter.

It has been just over two months. Mother's Day this year lands differently than it ever has.

For weeks at a time, she raised three boys while my dad travelled for work. She did not complain about it. She just figured it out. That was her way.

When my youngest brother was finally in school full days, she went back to school. She built an interior design business from scratch and made it successful. She had taste, integrity, and an instinct for what people actually needed even when they could not articulate it themselves. She could sell you something without you ever feeling sold to. The decision always felt like yours.

She was also the kind of person who could not be part of something without trying to make it better.

She became president of our cottage lake association and rebuilt what it meant from the ground up. She devised a block captain strategy that tripled membership within a year. She lobbied municipal councillors to make sure cottager interests were represented. She created a proxy voting system and sponsored candidates who understood what the community actually needed.

She did it because she saw a gap and could not look away from it.

I have thought about that a lot over the last two months.

Mom and I were not without our differences over the years. We were both determined. Both headstrong. Both convinced we were right more often than the evidence probably supported. We were similar in ways that made us clash and similar in ways that made us understand each other better than most.

In the last year we made real strides. We said things that had been sitting unsaid for too long. I am grateful for that year in a way I cannot fully express. Had I not been able to do so, I would’ve had a ton of regret when she passed.

One of my earliest memories of her is from baseball.

I was a baseball pitcher. For years, my mom would crouch down and catch for me. She did that until the day I threw one hard enough to hit her in the chest. That was the end of that arrangement.

At the time it was just a thing that happened. Now it is one of the things I think about most. The willingness to be in that position, literally, so her kid could develop something he cared about. I did not understand what that meant when I was living it.

I do now.

Maddie was my mom's first grandchild.

Maddie could be a handful at times. My mom helped teach her to sail. To waterski. She would take the grandkids at the cottage to give us a break, and she was always active with them, always in it rather than watching from the sideline.

As my brother started having kids and my mom got older, she said to Maddie once that she was not going to be able to do all the same things with the younger grandchildren that she had done with the older ones.

Maddie looked at her and said: "It doesn't need to be the same stuff Grandma. You'll just figure it out."

My mom loved to tell that story after Maddie passed away.

Those two could butt heads. Probably because they recognized each other. Same stubbornness. Same refusal to conform to anyone else's idea of how things should be done. Same quiet certainty about what mattered.

What I have learned in two months of grieving my mom, layered on top of eleven years of grieving Maddie, is this.

Grief does not always arrive as tears. Sometimes it arrives as clarity. As purpose. As the decision to stop waiting for the right moment to say the thing you should have said already.

And grief does not make you weaker. Not if you let it move through you rather than stop inside you. When you get to the place where you can carry it forward, something shifts. The loss does not get smaller. You just get a little larger than it.

Mom and Maddie are both gone.

And both of them make me better at being here than I would have been without them.

They are my accountability angels. You get to honour their memory in how you live your life. Not in the big gestures. In the daily ones. In how you show up. In whether you catch for your kid even when it hurts. In whether you say I love you before there is no more time to say it.

This to to every mother. The ones being celebrated. The ones being missed. The ones whose absence fills every room they used to be in.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

And if there is someone you have been meaning to call, do not wait. Not another day.