Another year or so down, a million resolutions unresolved. So I'm gonna try to beat the new year and get my fresh start while the old year is still breathing.
A friend of mine - an acquaintance, really, but one I like very much - recently lost her mother. She is a funny woman, my friend. Hysterically, roll-on-the-floor, quick-as-lightning funny. We know each other mostly through facebook, truth be told. And when she posted about her mother's death, stripped of the defense of humour, there it was - that old pain of loss, the one we will all feel eventually. The orphaning, the dropkick into maturity, the irrevocable shift in identity from child to parent, if we have been of the breeding type. My friend, who was to deliver her mother's eulogy, feared her ability to hold it together. It sucks, I wrote her. But don't worry about the tears. Whatever you have to give on that day will be the most honest tribute to your mother, and that's what counts. Off-wall, I added that giving the eulogy for my own mother was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. And that not a day goes by when I don't reach out for her in some small way.
When mom died, I fumbled my way through the funeral, sending the wrong outfit for the body, calling a halt to the fire and brimstone send-off of the hired minister, speaking over the piped-in organ music. It was, in short, a shit show. But was it honest? Yes. It was honest. It was me in all my brokenness and sorrow and pain and confusion and loss. It was also me before I had become a parent myself.
Now, nearly 15 years after my mother's death, as I try my best to be a good mother to my own four-year-old son, I think maybe it is time for me to let go. Maybe it is time to release my mother's memory from the stranglehold of my grief and give her my blessing to leave - not because my grief about losing her is any less, but because I want to be able to tell my kid about her without crying. I want him to understand his unknown grandmother as joy, not loss. For my mother was, in her own way, a joyous, silly, quirky, smart, and loving woman. Who loved me because I was her child.
And so it is with me and my son. I love him, I realize, as fully and selflessly as my mother loved us. And the grief I hold in my heart is a tightness that I don't want to pass on. Already he looks wide-eyed and tender at the tears that accompany any mention of my mother. Are you sad because your mommy is dead? he asks. And when I tell him yes, he holds me tight, intuitively comforting a grief he doesn't understand. It's okay, he says. You still have me.
And he's right. I do. And it's more than enough.
