Today is the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. Sometimes the loss feels settled, like the Universe has made the adjustments necessary to accommodate Mom’s absence and reluctantly moved on. Sometimes the feeling is raw and new, like losing her just happened. This yo-yoing makes sense to me. Mom may have a biographical death date, but the emotional impact of loss is not welded to linear time. It strikes whenever and wherever it chooses, shifting from melancholia to gut punch with a little too much ease.
Letting go of someone you love while assuring them that all will be well feels like an impossible contradiction. It’s almost too much to ask us to do. But nobody gets out of here alive. Helping to ease a soul from this world into the next is a profound event, especially when that soul is the one that brought you here in the first place.
For a while, I couldn’t picture my mom beyond that last hospital bed. Her death came at the end of a long decline, so maybe it’s no surprise that more vital recollections of her got stashed away deep in my consciousness. I needed to access a different set of emotions to help her, and that required focusing on the situation at hand rather than dwelling on memories of stronger days. Still, it seemed unfair that even after Mom passed, the happier, more vital versions of her self remained just beyond my reach. Eventually, with time, they began to re-emerge. They returned in no particular order, drifting from era to era as stories from her childhood in the Bronx and young adulthood mixed with my own memories of the mother I knew. The combination of her completed life and my ongoing lived experiences helped me to understand her better than before. I started to see things I’d missed.
A few years ago, I realized that the image of Mom I “saw” was no longer bound to this world. She’d become a vibrant flash of rose and gold, pulsating with light and love. Freed from the limitations of a body that no longer worked, she visited often. She attended my daughters’ weddings, blessed their newborns, remained a well of love and support. She was there during my brother’s difficult final year, so clear and strong that we spoke about it often. Not only was Mom not “gone,” she was present on her own terms.
I wrote the following on Mother’s Day 2016:
This is my third Mother’s Day without my mom, although I don’t need a special day to think about her. Not a day passes where she doesn’t cross my mind. There is always something I want to share with her, because she always wanted to know. We were her favorite reality show. She used to say that she’d never be ready to leave us, because she’d always want to see what happened next.
It will always startle me to look around a room during family gatherings and not see my mom where she usually was (right smack in the middle of whatever we were doing). But apparently she meant it when she said she’d never be ready to leave us, because I can finally say for certain that she is still here.
