I haven't spoken to my mother in almost four years.

It sounds weird when you say it like that.

Like we have some kind of fatal disagreement, some kind of resentment simmering under the surface, and she's not a part of my life or my children's lives or my husband or my future.

But the truth is, she's a part of all the things that matter.

I haven't spoken to my mother in almost four years because it's been almost four years since we lowered her casket into the ground, the rain pouring down around us just like always happens in the movies.

It's not by choice.

Strangely enough, it doesn't feel like that much time has gone by since I spoke to her. Perhaps because she's in my dreams - with less frequency now than a few years ago - and we talk there. Most of the time, when I wake, I don't recall what our conversations were about. There's only a lingering sense of satisfaction, of a void having been filled.

The thing is, my mother's DNA makes up half of mine. That's what I tell myself on the days when it gets to be too much to bear: the idea that she's not here, that I can't see her anymore, can't touch her hands or come to her for a double-sided hug. I tell myself that she is in me, literally. Not just in my heart, or whatever soppy nonsense the Hallmark "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow" cards would have you believe.

She comprises the building blocks of who I am today, both literally and figuratively.

I see her in myself when I laugh a little too hard and catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface...our smile lines are nearly identical.

I see her in myself when something bothers me about someone, and I pause and choose to give them the benefit of the doubt rather than jumping to conclusions or confronting them in anger.

I see her in myself when I don't allow clothes and books to be in the same pile when I'm reorganizing, when I pick up an item that's fallen off a shelf in a store, when I feel the urge to pray if I hear a siren passing by.

She is in my love of reading and creative writing, my tendency to say "gesundheit" rather than "bless you" when a person has sneezed, and in my propensity to gather leaves and pinecones in the fall.

I see her in the front part of my hair that refuses to curl no matter what I do to it, the shape of my fingernails when I let them grow long, and I hear her in my voice when it's played back on a recording.

So yes. I may not have spoken to my mother in almost four years, but that doesn't matter. Twenty years can have gone by and it still won't matter.

Why? Because really, she's still here every day.

I love you, Mamma. Happy would-have-been-60th Birthday.