She's gone (part 2)

So, as soon I wrote the words 'she's gone' in my last post, it hit me that my mom was dead. Looking back on the post, I see that I didn't even put a period after it- that's how much it hit me. As soon as I wrote it, I doubled over in my bed with my computer still on my lap, and just cried. After a while, I got back up, just to shut down my computer. Then I went back to crying, until I fell asleep.
Fortunately, I had therapy the next day. Within the first few sentences that I shared with my therapist about what had happened, I said the words: "My mom is dead." When I got to the word 'dead,' I choked up and stopped. My therapist pointed out that it was hard for me to say those words, and it was. It is.
This is confusing for me. I have known for my entire conscious life that my mother died when I was little. It has been a big part of my identity- I've always been the one without a mother. I know that my mom is dead. But, here I am, struggling to actually say that she is dead.
My therapist and I talked some more about what was going on, about how I don't want to let go, about how I feel like I just met my mom. But then she pointed out to me that I didn't really just meet my mom, my mom has been dead for 35 years.
This was confusing for me too, because I don't feel like she's been dead for 35 years. I feel like she's been floating around for 35 years, like a Jiminy Cricket or something, on my shoulder, looking out for me. But then my therapist reminded me again that she died, 35 years ago.
So then I thought about this mom, that's been hanging around all this time, and I thought about the fact that my mom actually did die, way back when.  And that's when I got really bummed out in therapy. Because what I realized was that this mom, this person who has been in my life all this time, was made up. I made up my mom as a six-year-old, and just kept her, all this time. She's made up. She was made up by a six-year-old to make things okay, to cope with something that she couldn't.
So then my therapist pointed out to me that it didn't just stop there. She explained that I had actually started to move beyond the fantasy mom that I had created as a little girl- that over the past year I had finally begun to see my mom as a real person. We talked about the fact that in doing this, I had begun to see that she and I had co existed, that she wasn't just a dead mom, that she had given birth to me and cared for me and loved me for six years. It was this acknowledgement that she had lived and died that lead me to the feeling I had been having of finally getting to know my mom. By seeing the reality of her life and death, I was able to feel connected to her.
And that's when I was sad again. I told my therapist how much I really didn't want to let go of that mom, how nice it had been to get to know her, to see her, to feel like she was real.
But my therapist pushed me some more. She pointed out that in seeing the reality of my mother's life and death, she became more real. When I heard this, I understood that she wanted me to let go of this mom too, that she was suggesting that in letting go of this mom, my mom would become even more real. I told her I didn't want to do this, because if I let go of this mom, I'd have nothing. She explained that that wasn't true, that I would still have the memory of my mom.
I struggled with this, to understand the difference between the mom who had been in my head all these years and the memories of my mom. I realized that the mom in my head was frozen, she was like a photograph- she never moved or responded or anything, she was just an icon. Then I thought about the mom I had been connecting with over the past year- about how I had seen my mom in lots of different ways, how I had seen her as a whole person, as a woman who was the same age as me. I said to my therapist: "It's like sesshin- once I accepted the reality of my experience with my mom, she changed from just a photograph to a real person."
So then I thought about the memories I have of my mom, and I don't really have any. I was really little so they're just snapshots: the car breaking down, serving the chocolate mousse at her book club, singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow with her as we listened to it on my little record player in my bedroom. It's hard for me to accept that this is all I will ever have of my mom, that this is all I am left with, still images of brief moments in time.
But it's the truth. I was six when my mom died. We didn't have any grown up conversations, I didn't really know her as a person, she was just my mom and I was just a kid and she died and I kept on living.