Note – I am actually writing this over 2 years later, with a lot of space & time. I could not have written this in the days after my Mom’s death, but that is when I am dating it for and that is the place I want to put these memories and these words.
My mom died.
I knew it was going to happen, but that doesn’t actually make it easier.
For those keeping track, I’ve now lost all of my parents so I’m an orphan. I mean. I’m a full grown adult and I have so many full grown adult siblings. And a Husband. And, I have my husband’s parents. But, still. I feel like an orphan.
Like someone adrift. I once was moored to my parents and now I am unmoored. That’s not a safe feeling. When I feel that way, I try to instead feel grateful for having the stability of being able to feel moored to my parents. I try to feel grateful for all of the years of their wisdom and guidance I was able to have. I try to steer myself towards being grateful for what I had instead of hateful for what I’ve lost. I guess that is what the whole process of grieving really comes down to.
Mostly everything I know about nature, I owe to my parents. My mom however, was the one who taught me to enjoy birdwatching. Even in lean times in our family, mom would spring for a bag of cheap bird seed to put out to see the birds come to the feeder. She also taught me mostly everything I know about flowering plants.
She bought me the first milkweed that started our whole monarch caterpillar thing here.
So many times spent sitting at the dining room table at her big picture window watching bluebirds and orioles diving into the front yard to eat bugs. Or seeing the hummingbirds coming to her little nectar feeder. Or seeing all of her mourning doves walking along the rail of her old deck where she’d feed them.
Oh, or the years at a different house where she fed SO MANY birds and one year had a special 1 legged seagull who would visit her for hotdog chunks.
My mom was a deep thinker. She taught me to be one, I hope. I’ve struggled to find words to talk about my mom and what the loss has meant to me. I’ve leaned on the words of others. I’m going to leave these here, mostly for my own memories as this comes up in time. But, some of you who have lost your mother will understand.
This first poem I read it made me smile. And think. My mom knew where the nearest cemetery was from when she was very young. Her mother, my Grammy in Cincinnati, was a keeper of graves – traveling to the cemetery frequently to place flowers, keep the gravestones clean & tended. Mom & I talked about that some especially in later years when we spent a lot of long hours together with death on our minds. She worried about what happened to all of the graves Grammy maintained. But also knew that wasn’t something she was called to do. She was cremated and her ashes exist in an easy to maintain clock and are spread to the wind with my Dad’s. Some people are cemetery people and others aren’t. Like my mom – I’m not. I suppose she raised us that way. It’s helped me though to spend more time remembering her in nature and the beauty that I see in God’s creation than to have a grave to visit. It suits me.
My siblings and I understand this one. Sometimes, I do still wonder about the mail.
“AFTER YOU DIE Just so you know after you die I will not wonder why you didn’t do your dishes or how long it’s been since you cleaned your oven or microwave or mopped your floors or why there were dust bunnies under the bed and behind the door After you’re gone I will not wonder how you could have allowed the piles of old mail to accumulate or why you saved so many bits and pieces of this and that or why you weren’t more goal-oriented and well-organized or why your refrigerator contained so many expired condiments When you are absent from all your familiar places I vow to avoid wondering why you didn’t eat less and exercise more or why you waited so long to stop smoking or drinking or whatever else was simultaneously soothing and deadly or why you took whatever risk may seem to have hastened your exit or why you left so much unsaid unfinished or unresolved I will only wonder if you knew how much you mattered to me just as you are as you were when we met in our temporary human disguises and laughed in the dressing room of the world at how funkily our skin suits fit at times I will wonder and hope you knew you were beloved I will wonder when we last hugged and whether you felt how our heartbeats converged and our bellies bumped like boats and then we both sighed ~ Marva Lee Weigelt
Blessing for the Brokenhearted Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love. Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound, when every day our waking opens it anew. Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this— as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it, as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still, as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.
Jan Richardson
Above is the beautiful Memorial plant given to me by my church friends. It will be a wonderful reminder of my mother and her love for the beauty of nature in the years to come.
