When My Mother Went Away

When my mother went away, she took with her a large part of my foundation.

If she were still with us, she would have just turned ninety-six. As it is though, she was gone seven years this Mother’s Day.

Her passing, though she was ready, tore my heart wide open.

Although I knew my parents would probably proceed me in death, I never really saw my mom as the sort of person who would actually die.

She had already survived so much.

She survived her own mother dying when she was five,

She survived her father signing her away to be adopted when she was six.

She survived being cut off from all her siblings because, as my grandmother saw it, those people weren’t her family anymore.

She survived being put out on the porch without a coat or shoes in the middle of a North Dakota winter because she passed gas at the supper table.

She survived losing the father who adopted her (whom she loved dearly) shortly after she graduated from high school.

She also survived raising the six of us.

When she actually died, even though it was imminent, it was a shock.

When I came back home, it still felt like I could pick up the phone and call her. Many times I almost did, realizing after that urge to call, that she wouldn’t be there to answer.

My grieving was interrupted. The year my mother died, my husband had the first of three surgeries-one after the other-about 4 months apart with physical therapy in between.

Stop.

It was at this point in writing this post two weeks ago, that I just stopped writing this and stared at the screen, all this emotion just piling up on me.

Fast forward two weeks. Two weeks in real time-our time now. Once again, I begin to write.

After my mom died, we had the surgeries. My husband, who thought he would recover and go back to work, was disabled and was not able to work anymore.

My dad died the following year, and because it was Easter week and many family members were out of town, we scheduled my parent’s funeral (they were both cremated) for four months later.

Then there was the cleaning out of the house.

The three story and a basement house.

The fifty-eight of their almost sixty-one years together house.

As I live so far away and I was working at the time, and with my husband’s disability, I wasn’t there to help as much as I would have liked to have been, but the rest of my siblings (there are six of us) did a great job of getting the house ready to sell.

The following year, the house sold.

It takes my mind time to make sense of things. To find the patterns. To work through all the emotions.

I need to put all the pieces together to understand it and move through it.

I’m still not on the other side of it yet.

I was half orphaned at fifty-five and fully orphaned at fifty-seven and I’m still not sure what to do with that.

It has altered every part of my being. It has affected my thinking and sent my mind to places familiar and places long forgotten.

My dad often wondered what kind of music it would make in heaven if someone from every language on the planet said the rosary in their own language at the same time.

I hope he was greeted with that beautiful sound when he arrived in heaven and I hope mom and Elizabeth, my sister who was stillborn, were there to share that with him.

I’d like to go to heaven for a sleepover with my mother like I did when she was in the nursing home. We stayed up late talking and laughing and enjoying each other’s company until the night nurse poked her head in and told us to go to sleep.

It made me smile for a long time. It still does.

I so miss having them physically here to hug and to cook for and to talk to. I miss my dad’s potato pancake story. I miss my mother’s clothes pins. I miss going home. I miss grilling out hot dogs and making potato salad with my siblings for a family gathering.

I miss sitting on the front porch in my pajamas sipping coffee early on a summer morning sucking in the cool air and my dad tells me I need a jacket and I tell him I’m sucking in all the cool air to take back to Georgia with me because it’s so stinking hot down there.

I hate that they’re not with us for the debut of their first great-great grandchild. I’m sure they met him in heaven before he came down here, but it would be so great to be able to share this experience with them.

I’m so grateful though, that I got to have my parents as long as I had them.

There is so much more to all this–some of it funny, some of it heartbreaking. I’m still working through it all.

The love and joy of family, the good times, the rough times, the times we are apart, the times we are together-it’s all so simple and basic and yet it’s so complicated–a paradox for sure.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

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