AYC, I feel that the difference between sadness and mourning is that the sadness is normal. I can accept the loss and still miss my mother’s arms, her hugs and kisses, the things she said, just being with her and having her in my life. Mourning is more like the really huge pain, how can I go on without you feeling, what am I going to do without you, life will never be the same, etc.
Sadness and missing in small doses, is fine. It happens, real mourning that envelopes you and stagnates you is only fine in the very beginning stages of loss and then it is important to move through the rest of the stages.
In all honesty I don’t even know how I had the chutzpah to just walk in and announce that I was here to help them and “be” the PTA which they didn’t have, and how can I help you kids. But I guess, Hashem just guided me and threw me into it. I had no idea that it would lead me into mentoring and then coaching so many teens. More so, I co-parented and even took boys into my own home. It was quite amazing. Many of them became extensions of our own family, so I have additional children and grandchildren from them. They actually refer to my husband as Tatty.
I did make my own labels. It is really not important what I wrote, you get to write what is important to you. You can write “l’zecher nishmos a remarkable woman who had a tremendous heart and sensitive soul” and continue from there. You can speak about what a good role model she was, and how she was more like a sister to you, or a mother to you than an actual blood relative, etc. Or you can write a poem that expresses your emotions and then just put l’zecher nishmos….