My Mother Taught Me Everything
Except How to Live Without Her
February, 2019
She seemed lost gazing at the wind blowing through the leaves in the tree above her, when suddenly she turned towards me. We hadn’t had a conversation for years and she had been uncommunicative for many months, sitting in a wheelchair with her broken body and mind. I hadn’t been able to “reach her” lately but suddenly as I sat there weeping and holding her hands, she moved a stiff arm that had been stuck in a pre-death rigor mortis state and stroked my forearm… a mother, caressing her child. She suddenly had tears also and our eyes met and held for an eternity of about 30 seconds. “Hang on God, let me pay closer attention … please stretch this time out” I wanted to shout. Without prompt or story or reason, I was simply gifted a moment of being mothered for the first time in a long time, and the last. I did not have a recent memory of experiencing this purity of love with my mother and now I do. That half of a minute washed away much pain from the past that now seems completely unimportant. It was a moment of redemption and reconciliation even. For it was too late to make the past different as I sat in broken heartedness with my mother under this tree.
It would only be a few short weeks later that I would be washing her dead body. Feeling her “gone-ness” and missing her “here-ness.” It was a holy and healing experience, this prayerful tradition of washing and preparing my mothers’ body for its journey home. As I washed her belly, I imagined the time that I grew inside there and the microscopic eggs forming that would later become my own daughter. What an honor to wash my first home in preparation for going back to the earth. There are two moments that are utterly beyond my ability to describe with written word. One was birthing my daughter at home and the other was washing my mothers' body with my daughter beside me.
As we lifted her lifeless and frail body into her simple wooden coffin, I offered the only prayer I could summons at the time, “Mama, please find peace and union with your long lost daughter, my sister, and your beloved husband and parents, and please wherever you are going, stay close to me, for I am not sure how to be a motherless daughter yet.” There was nothing delicate or dainty about this moment yet it was also profoundly and utterly exquisite. It was and still is a reminder that death is real and hurts like hell. Since that time, I have grappled with and slowly accepted the fierce reality of being alive without parents. She was my last parent to die and I am finding this to be a big fucking deal.
All of these months later, as the sadness slowly turns towards acceptance often times laced with despair, the prayer of “thank you” is becoming a bit easier to find.