still journaling, oh therapist

Death isn't something a person gets to get over. Hell, I still have trouble accepting it. I have never dealt well with change, though for a period of time I had deluded myself into believing that I did. I don't. My cat and I have a lot in common that way. We do eventually adapt, but that stuff that happens that's out of our control, well, it takes a while to get used to it.
So over a year later and it's still unthinkable to me that my mom is dead. I'm not in denial. It's just still hard for me to grasp. I feel infantile. How can she have been alive, and then not? What is it to be dead? And again I long for blind faith in something, anything, even atheism. I want to feel with conviction that she is gone, that she absolutely does not exist in any way anymore. She is dead and there is no soul, or ghost, or any such thing. Or I want to believe in some higher power, and feel that she is in some kind of after-life. But that just feels ridiculous to me. It sounds like a fairy tale. It's cute and all, but incredibly unlikely.
It's just so hard to let go. It's hard to accept that she died, that she isn't here anymore. No essence of her remains except that which we carry. When I was on the beach with my sister and her family (my family, too, but it's the family she created, not the one I was born into, which is why I refer to it as her's, just for clarification) and I asked if she was going to spread some of our mom's ashes in the ocean, she cried and said she wasn't ready to let mom go yet. And I understood. I am constantly trying to find ways to accept my mom's death, whether it's through art or therapy or writing. I don't talk about it to many people. What is there to say? I wish things had been different. Her death has fucked up my life. I'm angry about it. I'm not angry at her, but I'm angry at the circumstances. I delayed my senior year and now I can't find an internship. I have to spend another year in Providence. I don't think I would have gotten pneumonia if I hadn't been so stressed by my mom's death. I don't know that for sure, of course. A lot of things would have been different. But yeah, there's no going back. But I'm still angry.
I wish my mom had taken better care of herself. I wish she'd quit smoking when she was young, so her lungs would have been stronger and her immune system better. I wish she'd listened to her doctors. I wish a lot of things. I wish my sister would learn from our mom's mistakes, but she isn't. She's pushing herself just as hard and is smoking, too. It's difficult to watch it and not say anything. And when I do, she justifies it to herself. She's my big sister. I've never been able to stand up to her.
I want her, for all people, to quit for themselves. But what I really want is for people to quit smoking for the people that love them. Because I truly believe that, had my mom not been a smoker, she would still be alive. And I hate the thought of my nieces having to go through this in 20 years.
People don't like to face facts. Like I still can't accept my mom being dead. And I won't use terms like "passed away" because I feel like that just sugar coats it. She is dead. Dead. Cremated. She is ashes, spread across the east coast. Some of us try to forget her. Some of us want to remember. Others are caught in between. I have a lot of trouble talking about her. I don't know what to say. I wasn't close to her when I was growing up, and it took a long time for me to see her as a person. She always kept me distant. She, and everyone in my family, always tried to shield me. I still resent that. Why didn't my dad teach me how to take care of my car? Why didn't someone teach me how to take care of my money? There was a chapter in middle school math about it, and that was all. A week in seventh grade isn't enough to prepare you for college loans and all that goes with it. How do people deal with these things?
Everyone always assumes someone else will take care of everything. What about the person who actually does?
I suck at being that person, no matter how badly I want to excel.