Faith

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Spring Without Her III

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Now spring unfurls, and my awareness of my mother’s absence from the living blooming world is acute. The tulips pushing valiantly through the mulch, the budding out of ash trees and lilacs and weigela, the boy robins strutting their orange blaze, the young cardinals flashing crimson in the arborvitae. That the world is coming alive without my mother anywhere in it feels deeply disorienting and impossibly sad.

I think of the rambunctious, kidney-shaped patch of garden my mother tended; her pride and joy over decades of springs and summers. The few brown petals and yellowed bits of stem that now remain of her zigzagged rows of zinnias and black-eyed susans; the weeds and rabbits that have taken over where her feathery cosmos and festive nasturtiums grew.

My petite mother in her ancient floral pedal pushers and a sleeveless rose-colored blouse, kneeling in the dirt of her garden on a sunny spring afternoon, cursing the rabbits that had nibbled her sweet william to nubs. Her hands pressing marigolds into the soil, clasped around the tiny green seedlings as though in prayer.

My mother perched on the backstep before dinner with her juice glass of chablis and a book on her lap, her cigarette smoke drifting toward the three o’clocks and bleeding hearts.

Here in the city where I live, the lilacs along my fence are budding. Another pang, a toll of the bell, a thought of my mother, a picture. The purple lilac bushes she loved; she’d reach on tiptoes to snip off giant bunches of blooms to place in a gilded floral porcelain vase that had been her grandmother’s. The large red rosebushes she loved, the spreading crabapple trees she loved, the trumpets of nicotinia flowers she loved. Her affection for fluffy bachelor buttons and oddball snapdragons. The petunia and geranium plants her fingers pushed every year into large clay planters, plunking in cheerful windspinners and even a gnome on a stick for good measure. The delight she took from garden-fresh tomatoes. The vases of daisies always on her table.

My mother is dead. I realize it over and over again. When will I become inured to the shock of it? When will I just know it? When will it feel normal that I am here but that my mother is nowhere in the world, that the trees have come from dormancy to bud again but that my mother has simply ceased to exist?

Yet I know that’s not the end of it. Faith, broadly speaking; transcendent knowledge. The life of the spirit, chi, the new physics, old poetry, Melody’s universal sea of energy. My mother has departed her body, her hands won’t press cosmos into the earth. But perhaps in some manner or form she is still beholding robins and taking pleasure in lilacs. Is that possible? I don’t know where she is. The indestructible energy of her, the electromagnetic essence of her, the enduring spirit of her. Yes. But all of a piece? Free floating? Reincarnated?

Since her death, she has come to me clearly just once, the night after she died. It was near midnight; I was returning from a dinner out with friends, where I’d recounted the stories of my mother’s dying within the warm cocoon of attentive friendship and mellow wine and ravioli tossed with butternut squash. I hadn’t slept in 24 hours, although my midnight trip to claim my mother’s dead body seemed to have happened a very long time ago.

In the yellow streetlight glow along our alley, A. was nosing the car toward the door of our small garage. That’s when it happened. It was sudden and startling. I felt and sensed my mother’s presence just behind my left shoulder, almost as though she were leaning forward from the middle of the backseat. It was an intense physical presence that vibrated with warmth; it felt so substantial and real and profound that every nerve in me quivered.

How to really capture what I felt without sliding into hackneyed phrases or pure pablum, without evoking the slushy bathos of a movie on the Hallmark channel? I’m not sure it’s possible. The uncanny feeling of a radiating warmth, the sense of space highly charged and fully occupied, though nothing material could be seen there. The overpowering sense of my mother, of her essence; of a wavelength and an embrace. The love I felt. The absolutely certain understanding that she had arrived in some new form or place, been transmuted, was healed and in an essential way whole. The sense that she saw things whole as well, knew the truth of things. A sense of peace, but the vibe was not static; it felt somehow generative, creative.

It wasn’t Jesus I saw that night, of that I’m certain. I wasn’t filled with the holy spirit, wasn’t born again, won’t be speaking in tongues or working my grandmother’s rosary beads. Maybe, as my endlessly astonishing Lutheran seminarian grief counselor later suggested, my emotional and physical exhaustion had left my conscious mind uncharacteristically unguarded, open to the blurry, the extrasensory, even the mystical. The place at sleep’s edge can be like that, she said; can be a gateway to realms that lie beyond the ken of the everyday rational mind.

What I know for sure is that I did have the extraordinary feeling of being in the presence of my mother, or her essence, some 12 hours after she was released from her suffering body. Figment of my imagination? I can’t be entirely certain, of course—the freshness of my mother’s death, after all; my extreme fatigue, the warmth of the dinner with friends, the buzz of the wine. But the warmth and weight of my mother’s presence seemed palpable. “My mother’s here,” I said to A. in a strangled whisper. “Oh, do you feel her with you?” A. said. “No,” I whispered, “I mean she’s really here. Right here.”

She departed more gradually than she had come, staying with me into the house, finally ebbing away as I hung up my coat and walked toward the kitchen. But the warmth of her visit is with me still. It imparted a sense of peace that, again, is difficult to describe short of hackneyed sputterings. I will only say that my sense of connection with my mother was deepened by the experience, adding only that it led to me believe that my mother will continue to be present in my life, perhaps in powerful—and empowering—ways. I hope this is true. I don’t pretend to understand all of it yet. If this sounds hackneyed, so be it. It’s what happened. Maybe in time I can find a richer way of writing about it.

There’s a coda to this story of spring and my mother. Yesterday, as A. and I headed out for a walk, a bit of white caught my eye amid the Rosy Glow barberries and Wilton junipers and Stella D’Oro lillies I’d planted on a slope alongside the front steps. Litter, I thought; I reached to pluck it from beneath the greening plants. But it wasn’t litter. It was, in slightly weathered form, the small folded program from my mother’s funeral, with its poems of hope and renewal. I staggered, flabbergasted. Neither A. nor I could imagine how it had come to be there. Presumably a copy had flown out of a pocket or purse as we returned from my mother’s burial on February 2, and had since lain there under the snow. That’s the only plausible theory.

But of course plausibility is far from the point. This sign. My mother had come to me again, left a sign for me amid the budding and greening of spring in this frontyard garden of my own making. She’d chosen an apt calling card, the program with the poem I’d chosen for its lyrical promise that my mother would be more easily found after death in blooming flowers than in a grave.

Again I fear descending into Hallmark schmaltz; so decidedly not my style. This is not a story of grief wrapped up with a bow or an Oprah-ready parable of grief and redemption. It is not a tale of how I saw the Virgin Mary on the head of a tulip or my mother winking Kumbaya in morse code from the eyes of a chickadee.

But the inexplicability of it. Not just any errant scrap of paper, but the card from my mother’s funeral. Landing where it did. What are the odds? The thrilling mystery of it, the heartening joy of it. I do savor it. I carry the knowledge of it—the day my mother blew in to the yard—like an amulet, something to wield against the acuteness of my grief as the world bursts into spring for the first time in my lifetime without my mother in the world . . . or not as the person she was, the bright slangy brimming mother I loved and felt loved by, the avid gardener with a juice glass of wine and a good book and dirt under her fingernails.

My mother died barely 8 weeks ago. Tonight found me at a gathering where no one thought once to mention my mother or even to ask me how I was doing. How is that possible, I thought? The sadness I felt. My mother so alive to me still but so quickly vanished from the everyday world.

My first spring without her. She left me signs. I look for more. I move on as best I can.

———-
The lovely poem, by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932), that I printed on my mother’s funeral card.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

Hear it: A beautiful musical version of this poem is available
as a free download from Irish folksinger Shaz Oye.

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A Candle for My Mother, II

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

  In the shadows of the showy Beaux Arts Cathedral, I rose from a worn kneeler and turned back to contemplate the almost mystical glow of the votive stand. The small flames of the two candles I’d lit for my mother, the flickering pluck of them, the tiny shadows on the amber glass. I felt a pang noticing that they had grown discernibly shorter. I had set one wick burning for my mother, and then a second, lit from the first, for the daughter she had birthed and had now left grieving—for the essential truth that I was hers; for all of her that lived in me. On impulse, I tipped a match to the second candle and lit a third flame on an adjacent votive stand (another dollar in the box). A light that was made possible by the first two, I thought. One that would burn on. I knew the symbolism was simple and soft, even a little mawkish. But I indulged myself. My mother to me. My mother and me to this third symbolic flame.

Leaving the alcove–and that strangely moving statue of the Virgin Mary in young-mom mode–I set out into the baroque colossus of the cathedral, walking like a cat to mute the slapping reverb of my heels on the marble floor. The ornate and slighly culty grandeur of the place! The ornamented pilasters and balustrades; the bric a brac gone wild; the soaring stained-glass windows depicting martyrs in the throes of assorted agonies; the seas of burnished pews, vacant, weary, in shafts of late-afternoon sunlight; the metallic echoes of a few people—tourists and pilgrims—murmuring or praying softly. Granite columns, each as big as my bathroom; shrines tricked out in gold leaf; angels, saints, and the Holy Spirit gazing out of enormous dark canvasses. Front and center, a mammoth altar of black and gold marble, festooned with bronze latticework.

The overall effect seemed intended to leave no room for the human or the intimate. Perhaps it was meant to quash the faithful into awed submission by sheer granite and gold-leaf overwhelm. Still, I crept on. Here was another set of votive candles, an alcove devoted to St. Joseph. Here was an enormous padded chair, or throne, designated for the archbishop. Here was what had to be one of the world’s most towering organs, here a giant fresco featuring an eminence of some sort—an early-century Cardinal? Here, jarringly, was a rack with pamphlets —how to give money to restore a fresco or an arch, how to book a wedding or a funeral, how to support crusades against same-sex marriage and women’s right to choose. I paused, my blood stirring: had the brush with rightist Vatican morality campaigns pulled me out of my grief? But then I came to a series of alcoves announced, via wall plaque, as an international gallery of time’s most celebrated saints: Italy’s St. Anthony of Padua, Ireland’s St. Patrick, Russia’s St. Cyril, Germany’s St. Boniface, and a parade of others.

I stopped at France’s St. Therese of the Little Flower. My mother had a soft spot for St. Therese, I remembered. Her own mother had the same birthday as this French saint, and as my grandmother’s Catholic devotion deepened late in her life, she took to including in her daily Novenas special rosary-aided entreaties to St. Therese. She spent the last 12 years of her life—years 90 to 102, the sorry Alzheimer years—in a well-appointed nursing home that, as it happened, was named for the Little Flower.

Long before that, though, the fables of this early 20th-century French nun’s childlike simplicity, and the roses that rained when she died, had captured my mother’s imagination. She had kept from her own childhood a dog-eared storybook—from which she read to me—telling of the the marvelous things that might happen, flowers raining down, in a life modeled on Therese’s: honest and loving and faithful.

  No roses had rained for my mother, though. And none rained that day for me; even poised wet-eyed before the statue of St. Therese, I didn’t find my mother. “That isn’t surprising,” Melody observed when I told her about it. “You said your mother wasn’t especially religious.” That was true; the observant Catholic mother of my early childhood had drifted; I’d always suspected that the mettle of my mother’s faith had gone when neither her prayers nor her beloved brother’s abundant goodness had spared him from a deadly brain tumor at 60. Her attendance at mass had become erratic; she was all but unchurched except for occasional pilgrimmages to the renegade, social justice-y, flutes-and-guitars church in the center of the city. She’d had little interest in my offers to take her to mass, have a priest come to call. But she’d taken the trouble to write “Roman Catholic” on her living-will form.

There was also, Melody gently reminded me, the age-old truism of the elusiveness of what is actively searched for: Things come to you when you least expect it.

This was true of my visitation (for lack of a better word) from my mother, who came to me suddenly and quietly late one night as I was about to get out of the car outside my garage. I think constantly about this remarkable event; I need to write about it, and will.

But where is my mother now? I keep searching. I am unable not to.

And yet. Melody’s comforting metaphysics—all those intriguing quarks and vibrations, that pleasingly chi-like universal sea of energy—notwithstanding, I am also continually caught up short by the overwhelming feeling of utter loss, of a breathtaking finality. My mother was here in her life just weeks ago. She was here for nearly 85 years and now she isn’t. I poured a glass of wine tonight and was pierced to the core thinking of her … seeing her pouring her evening juice glass of Inglenook and spreading cheese on a few Pepperidge Farm butter crackers. The pleasure she took from it. The deep and inalterable truth of her no longer eating a cracker or coming to the phone.

And all of what I knew of my mother—what of it now? My mind brims, still, with all that I knew of the complex mosaic of my mother—that she loved Barbara Pym the novelist and orange Pim cookies, for instance. That she reserved the best spots in her garden for cosmos and nasturtium, possessed a peculiar fondness for “old man of the sea” knickknacks common in surfside souvenir shops, had been a favorite of all the barn cats on her Uncle Henry’s farm, had a finger that ached when it rained from a long-ago flattening in a doorlatch, preferred Tony Bennett to Frank Sinatra, had harbored a secret hankering to write, had saved in a box to the end of her life her baby shoes and her report cards and a Marx tin windup orchestra she’d adored as a child. All that I knew and took for granted … the thousands or millions of small shards of mom strewn casually or deeply in every corner of my memory—all of this was suddenly, wrenchingly, abstract, past tense, ephemera—trivia—from a house that no longer stood.

The candles are out. Perhaps it is true that, to paraphrase a 13th-century mystic, I was using a candle to look for the sun. But what I felt at that moment was that all that my mother was—the chapters and verses of her, the music of her, the singularity of her, the history of her, the petite plaid bent smiling person of her, the woman once a girl of her—is no longer on the earth. Not as my mother and not as a person. Not as she was.

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A Candle for My Mother

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of my father–and by my need to keep all of this at bay.

My mother was my first, my oldest, love; I knew her breath, her smells, her sighs, and the swish and thrub of her heart, before I knew anything else. For all the damage of my childhood, for all the distance of my adulthood, for all my ignorance of what really formed her marrow, there was still after my 49 years as her daughter such a vast lot that I did know of my mother, of her quirks and habits, of her thwarted ambitions and brimming heart.

My grief for my mother started many years ago. Her death, though, has brought the whole arc of my mother’s life achingly front and center in my own. But that’s only part of it. The feeling of being unmoored … The searing years of childhood coming back into view, and the arc of my own personal history thrown into bas relief. That … and the loss of the original thread, the core connection, the groundnote.

Can I find my mother? Melody asks. The promising new theories of physics, the old ones of Eastern philosophy and lyric poetry. Her body committed to earth in a gleaming oaken casket in a plot disconcertingly close to a freeway; her soul or energy released to the ether but somehow, somewhere still of the world.

And so I keep searing for a sense of connection with my mother–or perhaps for some semblance of what Melody calls grace.

Last week, leaving a cafe where I had quietly wept for my mother twice while listlessly eating a sandwich and reading the New York Times, I was moved to drive a few blocks south to the cathedral, a copper-domed Beaux Arts pile on a hill, and to light a candle for my mother.

Only after the wick had stuttered to a steady flame did I look around to notice that I was in a side chapel devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. My mother’s candle glowed just a few feet from an oddly affecting stone statue of one of time’s most celebrated mothers, Mary, holding—and gazing with loving concern upon—her legendary infant.

For a moment, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This Mary cradling her child to her ivory gown—the sweetness of it!—nudged loose stray motes of memory: A three-year-old me in a red sweater, sitting on my mother’s lap in a graceful wide-runnered rocking chair made by my mother’s grandfather. My plaid-pantsed mother gently kissing awake my three- or four-year-old pajamed self to come sit beside her on the living room sofa to watch a crooner—Shari Lewis? Ella Fitzgerald? Doris Day?—sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in fuzzy black-and-white on the boxy Zenith television.

I wanted more of these memories, but none came. Trying to summon them only brought less idyllic pictures: The cupboard-slamming ones, my mother’s desperate rages against the consuming needs of her children, the superciliousness of her husband, the mounting pains and unrelenting losses of her life.

I had feared that the candles I recalled from childhood might have been replaced by some sort of digital device. But there they were, skinny metal stands crowded with votives, with charred bits littering the amber glass bases and a narrow tin of long matches at the side. Amid a few dozen glowing candles, I had set my sights on an unlit one toward the middle, setting it ablaze after depositing in a slot the “suggested donation,” which was a dollar. (Were they once a nickel?)

Symbolism, if not religiosity, stirred in me. After being momentarily transfixed by the granite Mary with her infant, I turned back to the votives. I lit a second candle from the first—from mother to daughter, I thought. I knelt on a padded kneeler before a statue of Mary. I thought of my mother, of her afflicted life and the slog of her dying; I welled up again, softly. I summoned up some prayers from my early years in the pews: “Hail Mary, Full of Grace.” I mustered a small, hopeful approximation of fervency: Did Mary, in a heavenly place or in the universal ether, see my anguish? Was there a presence—a current of energy? an angel? my mother?—I might have pulled toward me for even a moment, with my candles and attempted prayers and tears?

I think I hoped a spritz of grace would waft my way, like the fragrant curls of incense the bizarre, possibly drunken, but pastorally effective priest had dispensed at my mother’s funeral mass. My feckless tries at prayer tacked effortlessly toward poetry, lines and stanzas running together willy-nilly in my mind. Mary Oliver: “What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me?” Emily Dickinson: “But most like chaos, stopless, cool,/Without a chance, or spar,/Or even a report of land/To justify despair” (Emily Dickinson).

I felt adrift. All of this felt somber; it had meaning. But I didn’t feel reborn, and I felt only marginally closer to my mother than I had earlier at the cafe with my tears falling onto the New York Times, or in the car at an intersection, where my heart ached as a white-haired woman with a walker navigated around a small bank of dirty snow outside a shop.

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The Physics of Grief

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

I’ve had one visit from my mother, the night after she died. It was extraordinary (and I do need to write about it).

But where is she now?

My grief counselor–a friendly hospital chaplain named Melody who came packaged with the hospice program that my mother was part of, if only for a slender few days–talked to me a few days ago of quantum physics, of breakthrough theories of time and space, of how energy might change form but will never dissipate, can never be destroyed.

This broadminded take on metaphysics clicked so perfectly with my own expansive spirituality –and was so unexpected from a Lutheran seminarian–that I looked at Melody in wonder. I had long ago left the clutch of catechism and the drone of mass for a more open and holistic spirituality. The vibrating strings and universal energy flows embraced on the frontiers of physics, much like the vital chi of Taoists, felt profoundly and intuitively true to me–and as lyrical an entree to the transcendent as a poem or a moonrise.

I felt immensely grateful to curly-headed Melody, who had entirely dispelled my early apprehension that she might prove to be too chatty, too chummy, too Lutheran, or otherwise unable to grasp the warp of my quirky temperament, the complex woof of my blighted heart. She seemed as oddly, likeably wise as the Dalai Lama. As she offered her surprising ruminations–on “the universal sea of energy” and on “the many ways of finding or understanding grace through grief”–I had a sense of something nourishing, something necessary, radiating warmly and deeply to my core.

Grace, Melody said again; what it means is different for everyone; how you find it is by continuing on grief’s journey. Grace–I found it lovely to contemplate, both the word, which seemed to carry a balletic elegance, and the concept, shrouded for me in appealing propositions having to do with healing and affirming, soul-deepening and coming to wisdom. Grace is another term I didn’t often use, although its essence thematically suffused much of the poetry I loved best: Mary Oliver, among others.

Could I find my mother’s energy in the world, Melody asked? Could I connect with it, maybe find ways to gather and magnify it, or take parts of it into (unto?) myself? That is the way, she said, toward grace.

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