Sorry for your loss. I hope you find good closure when you're ready - your rock collection is a great treasure and might serve as either a memento for you or a surrogate for ashes if you wanted to spread them on your nearby beach. Kind of a nice metaphor for a life well lived; collected from the chaos of the beach, polished up, and eventually returned, hopefully leaving things a little bit better.

Sorry you lost your mum, I’m in that club too.

The relentless sea may not transform them the way she did, but it will transform them nonetheless.

Might be a worthwhile ritual taking a handful to the shore and launching them out into earth’s great rock tumbler in her honor.

Or not; grief wears a new mask for each of us.

Your mum sounds very much like someone I would have liked.