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The thing about Kanan's death was that it was permanent.
The thing about Ezra's disappearance was that the galaxy was wide and vast and Hera had a war to fight and a baby to care for. That in his last message, Ezra had spoken with finality and an apparent knowledge that he would be gone for a long time. That the purrgil, an animal Hera hardly knew of or understood, had taken her first son into deep space, and that he had not been seen nor heard from in years.
Kanan was gone. That was true and irrevocably permanent.
Ezra was gone. This was true but not permanent.
In the months after the Battle of Lothal, Hera had made lists in her head. Things she couldn’t change and things she could.
Things she couldn’t change:
-Kanan was dead
-Her child would never meet their father
-Her family would forever be missing at least one member
-Her family was splintered, spread out across the galaxy
Then, the things that she could change:
-The Rebellion was struggling against the Empire
-Her child would be raised by a single mother
-Her child would be raised during a galactic war
-Ezra was gone
The second list became itemized. It became her lifeline, a mantra she repeated to herself when the grief or the fear threatened to overwhelm her. She would get through her pregnancy and figure out a way to care for her baby. She would survive the next battle, then the next. The Rebellion would grow. They would win the war. Then, they would find Ezra.
It was difficult to reconcile with the order of things. Gods, she just wanted Ezra back. She wanted Kanan back, too, but he was, impossibly, further away than Ezra. She wanted to spend every second of every day combing every inch of the galaxy for Ezra, but first.
But first, they had a war to fight.
Her boys seemed to realize this before they left her. Kanan and Ezra had accepted their fates calmly- my loss is secondary to the war. Secondary to your survival.
And also:
I love you. I do this for Lothal. I do it for you, and for our family. I am far but not gone. I will see you again one day.
They had left her with so many things unsaid.
One day apparently meant years or decades in the future. Too long for Hera to count the hours or rotations. By the time Jacen was born, she had already lost track of the exact number of days she had been without her partner and son.
It was ridiculously unfair. But Hera had lost her mother to war before she had reached adulthood, so she was used to unfair.
She was used to loss. She knew how to grieve effectively. She didn’t want to- she had waited so long to say I love you to Kanan for that very reason- but that didn’t matter. She had loved him long before she declared it out loud.
Hera understood how to heal from a permanent loss. She knew how to survive with half a heart.
Mourning Ezra was different, because she waited for years for Ezra to suddenly remerge, and he didn’t. Hera missed him and mourned for that loss, but she couldn’t accept that he was truly gone.
Maybe that was a bittersweet blessing, though. She had healed from Kanan’s loss (for the most part) before realizing that Ezra would be gone for a long, long time, and so she had to grieve him too.
That was another battle she had faced: Hera expected to see Ezra everywhere she went. On every backwater world, she searched for his face, had his name on the tip of her tongue, ready to call out for him when he was finally spotted.
That never happened. The war continued, then the war ended.
Sabine came to her when all was said and done, and vowed to find Ezra. It was a calling, she said. Something she knew she had to do- something Ezra had told her to do.
In some ways, Sabine had already flown from the nest- Hera and Kanan had let her go for the sake of Mandalore, and that was a decision that hurt, but that had been accepted. She was their family, but she was an adult. They were proud of her, and she would forge her own path, even if it diverged from theirs.
Hera gave her blessing for Sabine to leave again.
She hugged the young woman- her daughter in all but blood, and told her to bring Ezra home.
There they were: more unspoken words. The ones that had come to her when she accepted the losses of Kanan and Ezra, the ones she used to soothe herself as she watched Sabine depart again.
I love you. I have loved you since the day you entered my life. In order to survive, I must let you go.
(For now.)