What's Worth Writing About?

My mother died on August 5, 2012.  She was 81. She had been married to our father for 57 years.  In the month preceding her death, when we had been told that medicine could do nothing for her, I had many hours to spend with her at her bedside in Victoria.  We planned her funeral, which isn't as macabre as it may sound: she wanted particular songs, and writings, and she would have been pleased that the family pitched in to do a variety of tasks, mostly including her grandchildren who were present. She would have loved the fantastic floral creations put together by my sisters and nieces; she would have been pleased to see the old friends who showed up to offer their loving remembrances; she would have...

but wait.  There's always this conditional, when we think of the dead. "She would have" implicitly suggests that she wasn't there. It raises the questions, at least for those of us who believe that this life is not the final one, of how much consciousness, or presence, or connection remains, for a soul no longer in the body that has carried it through the physical world.  There are so many mysteries, and in the time after a loved one passes, I have found that day after day, I wonder about what she shares with us still.

Other believers have assured me that various signs and symbols are surely sideways messages from "above"...heaven, or what you will.  I have read and re-read both secular and religious texts about what comes next. I find that my conversation is full of "Mom" this and "Mom" that: I can't stop talking about her, telling stories about her, recalling her to mind and heart.  I have printed pictures of her and posted them all over the house, pictures with Dad and with me and with my five siblings and all of the assorted brothers-in-law and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and many, many friends. Like one of my sisters has expressed, I find myself conscious of thinking, "Oh, wouldn't Mom have loved that"...whether it's a hummingbird at the feeder, or a cool shape of a sunflower, or a snatch of song.  I think all of this is simply a way of saying, simply: I miss her.

So I decided that it's time to blog again. I started the blog because I was writing family letters, but then someone would get left out, or I wanted to refer to something and e-mail was cumbersome...and then Facebook came along, and most of my relatives and many friends read what is there, or at least, can. But a blog has, as I tell my students, a different sense of audience. To whom are we writing? Maybe simply to ourselves. I have watched, several times, the explications and queries in Mike Wesch's classic deconstructions of public vs. private communications (why we sit alone in our rooms and type stuff to other people we may never meet)...and I think, maybe this is worth talking about. Maybe this is worth writing about: how it feels when your mother dies.

We said a lot of things to each other, Mom and me, in the month before she died.  She kept thanking me for things I was doing, and I actually got a little testy about it. I told her to stop thanking me. It was, after all, her due. But that was one of the things I learned, in her last days: that for everything, no matter how small, she was living in a state of gratitude. And I would say things that weren't characteristic, emotional things, not-living-in-my-head things, like, "Thank you for being a good mother," and she'd smile, and turn it right around, "Thank you for being a good daughter." Not that she was unrealistic: I talked to her about regrets, and said to her, "Sometimes when I was doing something I shouldn't, it was thinking about you that would stop me." She looked at me, and said, somewhat dryly: "Not enough." I agreed, and we both laughed. Not enough.  But no judgment: just a rueful acknowledgment of our human frailty. Shared.

And the laughter and songs: they were her characteristics, and she has bequeathed them to me and to my siblings. Yesterday I had occasion to laugh, pretty hard, at school: it's a long story, but my grade nine class and I were outside, watching one of the class running off his energy, and he accidentally bumped into an evergreen tree. We, his teacher and peers, watched him in pantomime, pausing, no doubt, to say some choice things as to where he'd been stuck, and we all just giggled. It may not have been sympathetic, but it was funny (one of those you-had-to-be-there moments, I'm sure)...and as I laughed, and we hooted together, these fourteen-year-olds and me, I thought of Mom, and thanked her for the big, spontaneous joy that she found in even the smallest moments, so that now, I can give myself permission to explode into a riotous belly-laugh.  She gave me that.

In the final days, you see, all that was left was love and its signals: listening, sharing, music, joy, laughter. Feeding her yogurt (yes, what goes around comes around)!  The issues, the complaints (teenage angst meets religious adamancy), the revisionist history (how many dishes did I wash, meals did I cook?), the storytelling (repetitious, much?)...all of it was part of a legacy of knowing that I was blessed. We were blessed. She was, really, a good mother. A great mother. I don't know if she died knowing, at peace, with her own accomplishments, but I know that she went on her last journey cocooned in love because that what she'd given. All her life, she knew how to love.

Gratitude, joy, spirit, prayer, song, beauty: her legacy.  She didn't talk about it much, but she lived love.  So I'll say it again: I miss her. And that's worth writing about.