I’m sorry for your loss, @Hansey. Your mother sounds like a wonderful person and your relationship was clearly really deep.
I believe in heaven, but it comes to me as part of a whole matrix of Christian beliefs that add up to “We are made to live forever with the God that brought us into being.” Some of that is probably a long bridge to cross for you.
But even so, there are some potential truths in the very understandable feelings you’re having. For instance: Hope. Even in a Christian context, we have to be honest that we don’t know what the promised life after death is really like. We can’t conceive of it. But we can have hope. Hope that, in some form, those we’ve loved don’t simply disappear into nothingness. That while we know them in their bodies, and those bodies die, that nonetheless there is part of them that seems to transcend the material, and maybe that part remains somehow.
A philosophy teacher once had my class read a chunk of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look Homeward Angel, and it’s always stuck with me. Wolfe’s beloved brother, Ben, contracts Spanish Flu and dies young. It leads Wolfe to this conclusion:
We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death–but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?
I suspect you feel this way about your mother. It’s clearly a natural impulse. But maybe, just maybe, it also points to an radical truth. Maybe our instincts are somehow right, and the person we know in life–that presence that impresses itself on us, and the places they inhabited, the things they were close to–maybe they don’t seem to totally go away because they don’t totally go away.
@jpinard brought up some of these questions about a year ago when his dad got sick. There was a lot of philosophical conversation there, if you feel like diving into it. Either way, I hope you find comfort in your loss.