Death

...now browsing by tag

 
Cemetery Death Emphysema Faith Family Family History Father Grief Hospice Illness Midlife Mother Mothers and Daughters Physics Religion Writing
 

Revisiting My Mother’s Grave

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

The orderly rows of the national cemetery don’t suit my mother. In her life she was a jaunty jumble, plaid pants and crazy knickknack shelves, swirls of cigarette smoke, piano bench cascading with sheet music. Her topsy-turvy mornings in the kitchen on the red swivel stool with a foot propped on the broken dishwasher, the radio playing, the teeming ashtrays and lipsticked coffee cups, the sections of the morning newspaper splayed over heaps of books from the library.

The farrago of her nightstands and countertops. A thousand scraps of paper: receipts and grocery lists and all of her notes on everyday life: her elliptical book reviews (“Doris Lessing Golden Notebook—very good”); pediatric research (“amoxicillin best for pneumonia in children, but not if mycoplasma”); and news flashes from phone conversations [“John now vp for all of General Mills,” “Mia hurt knee and has new magazine for university”)—all scrawled in her breezy cursive, laced with the crooked lines and squiggles of her expert Gregg shorthand. Beyond the window, the colorful eccentricity of her garden, the large red rosebushes tangled in the cosmos.

My brimming, replete, untidy, exquisitely alive mother. She loved beauty and stimulating activity; had been the daughter of musicians, after all; had dressed in smart suits for a downtown business career. She did her best to fill the voids during her long and sometimes grim exile in the suburban split level, finding ways to project herself against the consuming sprawl of my father (every table and chair buried in his books and articles, every spare room given over to his hobbies, every wall festooned with his favored paintings and prints).

She made what lairs she could: the kitchen counter with its interesting jumbles; the bookcase next to her bed crammed with mementoes and family snapshots; the knickknack stand in a corner of the dining room, its carefully arranged and regularly dusted trinkets spanning a 19th-century Austrian music box from her grandmother and a misshapen nut bowl I’d made in 1st grade. The back stoop off the kitchen, where she stole moments of bliss in the evening beholding backyard beauty, smoking her menthol cigarettes as the sun swooshed its departing oranges above her garden.

But now. Her small marble marker (her embalmed remains in that well-joined oaken box—not even thinking of the bewildering corporeality of it), her perfectly measured gravesite lined up with precision in a row among thousands of others in a vast spare grassy flatland between freeway and airport. These grounds in some respects pretty, but never lovely: Too sparse, too stinting, too orderly, its few crabapples and oaks outmatched by acres of sod and long granite rows.


What, I think (kneeling to arrange the daisies and roses I have brought into the shiny little green cone picked up at the Flower Receptacle bin)–what has this relentlessly regimental landscape, this gravesite, this orderly and symmetrical place … what has any of this to do with my mother?

****************

I turned back one for one last look before I crossed the road to the car. Standing next to the tree (was it a Linden?) at the end of my mother’s row, my eye was drawn to the profusion of bright green shoots sprouting from the trunk. Well, I thought, that’s something.

And then, driving slowly around the loop road toward the entrance, I came to a small crowd of mourners at what was clearly a military funeral, two dozen greying army men standing at attention (in their pressed green slacks and shirtsleeves and berets) for the rifle salute of an honor guard. I stopped some 30 yards away, entirely undone as a bugler played “Taps.”

This very formal and militaristic sendoff, not particularly large, few mourners aside from the honor guard, something routine and lackluster about it all—and the bugler’s “Day is Done” strains had a discernibly wobbling tone. Yet still, the somber ceremony moved me. Attention was paid, I thought … recalling, in contrast, the sorry sendoff for my mother on that frigid day in February.

Our ragtag assemblage at the funeral home, the awkward strain of dealing with my impaired father, the tuneless “I’ll Be Seeing You” pinged out by the hack pianist the funeral home had hired … and then our little group shivering for no more than two or three minutes over my mother’s casket in a “committal area” reminiscent of a warehouse storage facility area as the sweaty Father Dobrozky galloped at breakneck speed through a Hail Mary before fleeing in his waiting car.

No “Taps” for her, I thought, looking toward the grave where my mother’s remains had so unceremoniously been committed to the sod, looking across the long rows stretching toward the airport on one side and the freeway on the other. Eyes welling and heart bursting; yearning for proper commemoration not only of my mother’s death, but of the 85 years she had lived.

This is how it is, I thought. A lifetime of experiences and memories, of stirring the earth’s molecules daily and for decades with your gifts and strivings and yearnings, of tending nasturtiums and sick children, of knowing things and writing things down and regarding beauty and making music, of laughter and sufferings and prayers. Just gone. Just gone: my untidy, vibrant, remarkable mother.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | 2 Responses »
Tags: , , , ,

Everything Slumps

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.

No card will come from my mother this year.

I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?

Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and regret commingled with aching, yawning, tangled pain. Back in it: the loss of her, and how hard her final years were, and what it was for her to be that broken wren with ravaged lungs who kept pushing that walker with her face turned so brightly to the world, and the cruel facts of all that she lost and suffered in her life. And the many ways I failed her.

The loss of her, but more, too: With my mother gone, all of what used to seem so large and expansive and certain—the historical framework of her life, and mine as her daughter—now seems tenuous. I feel cut adrift from the history that was hers, the stories of her childhood, the sense of a living connection to her large and vibrant family. The father whose shtetl-to-tenement Jewish immigrant story made all the more remarkable his rise to urbane mid-century orchestra leader. The mother whose German pioneer parents ran a large farm while raising eight children to be professional musicians. All this now seems increasingly vague, disconcertingly abstract.

I feel a slipping away of the connecting threads, of the certainty of enduring ties, of everyday engagement with what my mother experienced and knew. The ordinary verities of her life: What does any of it matter now? I feel compelled to declaim things she knew—the experiences and memories that were organic to my mother, that came to seem inseparable from her: Here is the street of snug 1920s houses where spirited Aunt Anna lived, where eccentric Uncle Ed once tipped over in a wing chair while listening to John Phillip Sousa music on the Victrola. Here is the garden center where Elsie, my grandmother, briefly worked after my grandfather’s death, pruning azaleas and potting geraniums in a green smock over her plaid Pendleton jacket. Here is the slipshod bungalow where Aunt Mame ended up after losing her home to unscrupulous bankers in 1935, here is a trendy boutique where once there was a corner drugstore, soda fountain and all, owned by the parents of my mother’s teenage pal Rose.

The entwining of my own experiences with my mother’s from the time my tiny heart beat just beneath her large one. All that I came to know through her stories, to see through her eyes. The wistful loneliness I feel when the waiter brings bread in a cafe, my mother’s voice in my head singing “le beurre!” as she never failed to do when passing the butter dish; then I’m recalling her much-told (if improbable) tale of how she failed high school French because, having also enrolled in Spanish, she’d mistakenly completed her French exam in, as she put it, “not parlez-vous-Francais, but Ess-span-yol!”

The many things I recall and know—and am—because I am my mother’s daughter. The weave of history, of memory; a shared tapestry, and now a bewildering inheritance. If I am inseparable from her, now what? No daughter of my own; what, then, of my mother’s legacy; what, then, of my own?

Most of all, this: With my mother gone, will the skein unravel? Will the threads hold?

********

Every year on my birthday, my mother would make a big show of retelling—in a marveling tone, with gestural flourishes—the story of our first shared experience in the world. How it was a gloriously beautiful sunny October day, warm enough for her to don oversized pedal-pushers with her maternity blouse. How she knew in mid-afternoon, while enjoying coffeecake with my grandmother, that I was about to make my debut, and how my grandmother drove her to St. Barnabas hospital in her Plymouth, all the way exhorting my mother to “hold on, sis, I’m no midwife!” How I was an easy birth, out of her womb in a flash and nestled contentedly in her arms by 4:30, such a happy baby; how she cooed “my darling, darling daughter” in a ray of gold-glinted autumn sun beaming in the hospital window.

She’s not here to retell the story this year, or to see me shake my head in fake bemusement at her silly sentimental mugging. She would have been dismayed, I know, to see the snow that fell from October’s skies this year. Snow! The wet flakes turned to ice on the still-blooming lillies on the front-yard slope, closed the resplendent blossoms on the hibiscus, took the still-ripening heirloom tomatoes on the vine.

It’s because of my mother. I can’t help but think it. Thirty degrees in mid-October, the once-plucky geraniums now hanging their heads alongside a snow shovel better suited to December. The ash trees curling their leaves in shock or sorrow, color draining from the late-summer coneflowers and the weigela that only last week rebloomed on the front-yard hill.

Frost on the heirlooms; thyme frozen; the remaining harvest gone. I suffer the unseasonable chill, bemoan its insults and losses, but in truth I’m not surprised by it. My own roots heaving. This October altogether so much colder.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts, Quest for Meaning | 3 Responses »
Tags: , , , , ,

Happy Birthday, Mom

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Today is my mother’s birthday.

New rivers of grief. Oceans, actually. Waves of emotions and memories, tumultuous. I feel undone, overwhelmed.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | No Responses »
Tags: , , ,

Mother’s Day

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Today, for the first time, I visited my mother’s grave. She is buried in the flat grassy octagon of a national cemetery near the airport; her grave is in a farflung corner alongside a freeway. How ironic, I think, that her mortal remains lie near fast lanes and flight paths, she who spent her life so trapped.

Seeing the marble headstone bearing her name was a strange experience. Her January death placed her grave among rows marking winter deaths, one of a thousand graves the groundskeepers dug in November, before the ground froze. The older sections of the cemetery have lush grass and mature trees, with the rows for World War I veterans especially lovely and moving. My mother’s parents are buried there—the orchestra leader grandfather, son of Polish Jews, who died the year I was born and the pianist grandmother I adored, daughter of Austrian Catholics, who died, at age 102, in 1994. Their gravesites are amid oaks with verdant canopies and pink crabapple trees in full bloom on a sunny May afternoon.

But the area around my mother’s grave is little more than a treeless dirt patch, which I find dispiriting. In truth, the grave does not feel as though it has much to do with my mother’s life, or my grief. Too, it is galling to see the “wife of” inscription yoking her to my father, and thus to the whole unhappy arc of her life that proceeded from her marriage; it is of course an unavoidable consequence of her wish that we take advantage of the thrifty burial option she had as the spouse of a World War II veteran.

Still, despite everything, I am a little moved to see this place where her oaken casket came to rest, this small plot of land marked with her name and the dates of her birth and death. Proof, perhaps: She was here in the world for 84 years and 8 months, she has passed out of the world into another state of being, she is remembered.

I placed a bouquet of tulips at her gravesite and laid atop the marker a small stone gnarled with quartz I took from my bookshelf: an invocation of Jewish ritual, a nod to the long-overlooked Jewish half of my mother’s heritage. Disregarding cemetery regulations, I had brought a bottle of wine and two slender glasses that were something like the juice glasses my mom favored for her brief happy-hour interludes—her 15 minutes of peace perched in her knit slacks and oddball vests and sensible shoes on the back stoop, gazing out over her nasturtiums or skimming a novel, enjoying a half dozen sips of chablis and a few cheese-topped crackers and, for too many years, her cigarettes.

Next to the headstone I propped the large photo I had displayed at my mother’s funeral: my smiling mother in a bright red jacket raising a wine glass (a proper one, tulip-shaped) in exuberant toast. And there in the dirt patch between airport and freeway, in the only place on earth indelibly marked with her name, A. and I toasted her right back.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | 2 Responses »
Tags: , , ,

Grief, Sprawling

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

My grief for my mother sprawls in many directions. My smart, vibrant, warm, plucky mother spent three agonizing years stooped and gasping for breath over the handles of a walker, her body ravaged and withered by emphysema. It was terrible. I could try for 10 years and not come close to describing how heartbreaking it felt to watch her push through each day.

What was—and is—all the more unbearable is that her struggle was much, much worse than it had to be. Her marriage was always a bad bargain; it proved truly ruinous when she got sick. As the spouse of a woman suffering from both advanced emphysema and encroaching Alzheimer’s, my father was something like a perfect storm: selfish, inept, resentful, and increasingly impaired by depression and a paranoia-laced dementia. And thus the massive slow-motion train wreck I got in the habit of calling The Big Mess With Mom; see also Back Story. Train wreck and hostage drama: My mother enduring needless hardship and decline in thrall to a profoundly dysfunctional man determined only that she should continue getting dinner on the table at 5.

I failed to spare my mother this. I did try. And try, and try. It drained me; it cost me. It required skills I didn’t have. It revived old traumas and stirred old guilts. It plundered my time and ruined my sleep. It drew oceans of tears. It drove me to despair. But still I failed. I tried to save her and I couldn’t, and I am consumed with guilt: I should have tried harder. I should have done more.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | 1 Response »
Tags: , , , , , ,

Spring Without Her

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

The burgeoning of spring opens new wounds of grief.

My mother’s heart shuddered to stillness in the dead of winter, the trees stark and leafless. It was one of the coldest nights in years. Yet there was also a mist in the air, heavy and warm and strange, as my mother’s body was wheeled out of the care center into a brightly lit driveway.

It was around 3 in the morning. The gurney bearing the still soft body of my mother was being pushed toward a waiting hearse by two young men from the mortuary, one of them with an enormous belly; their bleary looks and the rumpled khaki pants below their blue blazers suggested they had been yanked from sleep to answer yet another call on the death beat.

After we had left my mother’s room ahead of the mortuary men, my sister had gone to her car and A. had continued on toward ours, but I felt compelled to stop in my tracks as the two young men wheeled my mother’s body slowly by. To bear witness. The almost imperceptible roundedness in the black body bag that was both my mother and not my mother. The mortal remains of her. The spent shell of her; its heat and light gone. The vessel in which she had lived for nearly 85 years, its wrecked lungs finally done.


The dead of winter. The dead of night. The frozen stillness of a January grief. My tears thickening in the peculiarly warm mist on that cold and starless night when my mother’s spirit departed the world and left this ruined shell to be buried in her memory. The world seemed too iced in to care.

The dirty snow in the parking lot. Not a leaf to flutter at my mother’s passing, not a flower to droop in sadness, not a bird to trill a mourning note.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | No Responses »
Tags: , , ,

Spring Without Her II

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

The room my mother died in seemed to be waiting for spring. It was a large, westerly-facing room with a windowed balcony onto a rolling wetland. We’d seen elegant Great Blue Herons wading in the pond during my mother’s previous care center visit, at summer’s peak. The pond was frozen now, drifted over with snow, ringed by skeletal maples and willows and the brown husks of dormant wildflowers.

From my mother’s bed, you could gaze directly out over the wetland. The vista had the spare, weary, beauty of winter; grey and white; architectural. Spring would be glorious. But even now, in winter’s diffused light, the room was still something to behold: spacious and sun-dappled, its freshly carpeted tidiness thrilling after the slovenliness of my mother’s first room. The large closet! The sparkling bathroom! The slender table holding a large vase of silken poppies I’d brought it, so real-looking their leaves were fraying from the inquisitive pinches of aides. A cd player on the nightstand, left by hospice’s music therapy team, cued to a new age piano cd called “Healing.” The pleasing hush of the choice end-of-hallway location; the soft whoosh of my mother’s oxygen concentrator, the gentle bubbling of the humidifier.

Procuring this serene and lovely room for my mother was a triumph. After hounding the staff for three weeks, it took a burst of full-throttle fury for me to at last spring her from the appalling shambles of a room on the ground floor. The snapping point had been that long Saturday evening when the world seemed to pitch sideways: That companionable and fervid night in the cramped room where clutter reigned and blankets were banked against the frost on the window; the night my mother grieved her vanishing vision and fretted about my 401K; the night I wept in a wing chair in a dimly lit lobby as the hospice nurse told me my mother was not going to take anywhere near 9 months to die.

By Monday—having used the word disgraceful, having emphasized tomorrow, having been ready to snap photos for a complaint to the state—I got confirmation from the social worker: “Your mother is being moved this afternoon.” A primo room, the care center’s jewel, I learned. Later, another social worker told me there’d been an internecine dispute about it from the moment the previous resident had died: “I’d promised the room to someone else, someone ahead of your mother on the waiting list,” she said. “Your mother’s needs were more urgent, but … Well, your mother had come off Medicare first, so that did give her an edge.” She paused. “And of course there were clearly some issues with your mother’s previous room.”

Blissfully unaware of these negotiations, or of how I had all but rioted on her behalf, on Monday evening my frail and bewildered mother was finally rolled to her new room in a wheelchair. She took the brief journey—a short hallway, an elevator, a long hallway—with her customary interest, smiling at aides, perking up at sight of the piano in the second-floor commons. The exertions of moving and resettling exhausted her, though, draining what minute dribs of stamina she had.

But there she was, at last, my mother, tucked like a pea-sized queen into fresh linens in a room so agreeable it bordered on the fabulous. She lay propped on her mountain of pillows just two feet from the large window with its wetland vista that all but promised a magnificent spring. How beautiful it will be! I began to say to my mother, but stopped; mentioning spring wasn’t smart; it would only have triggered one of my mother’s frequent bouts of anxiety about where she was, and why, and when she might go home.

And of course, I knew that my mother was not going to make it to spring. I also knew, as I looked at my tiny broken wren of a mother, her shoulders heaving, her breaths growing both more jagged and shallow, that I couldn’t possibly wish that for her, and didn’t.

She went faster than I had imagined or was ready for. She had just three days in that halcyon room, not even enough time to sample all the soothing hospice ministrations queued up to ease her dying: the massages, the music therapy, the pastoral visits, the little juice glasses of wine that would be catnip for her and might even, the doctors said, be good for her laboring lungs.

She didn’t see spring stir in the wetland, didn’t make it to February, didn’t even last a week. But I do know that she found in those serene surroundings whatever it was she needed for letting go, for the release of her spirit. Initially, she found the large, quiet room perplexing—not a hospital room, not an apartment; what then?

But the day she died, as I knelt by her bedside massaging her forehead, one of the few sentences she uttered from her dozy drifting consciousness was about the pleasure of being in that room. “How do you like all this?” she said with a half wave of her hand. Her eyes were closed and there was a calm smile on her face. She nodded slightly. Then she patted my hand. “So quiet,” she murmured. “Peaceful.”

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | No Responses »
Tags: , , , ,

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.

Share

Posted in Grief and Mother-Loss, Latest Posts | 3 Responses »
Tags: , , , , ,

« Older Entries