Love was the word today. And there was a lot to love about the day, the final touches of spruce up the town for the holidays got finished, I had really good pizza for dinner and it was not windy. Still I was a bit perplexed about the word of the day till I remembered my mother. Tomorrow is the second anniversary of her death.
My mother was a very charming woman, not so much to her children. I believe she thought if she showed us affection we might be too content to potty train. Seven children. But in her dying days which were about ten, she smiled and said I love you upmteen times a day. On the days she had strength she interspersed her love words with her regular ‘straighten ups’ to her offspring.
Here’s one scene: my sister leans over the hospital bed rail and says “Hi Mom I love you” to the fading one who responds, “Wow, you have a big bum.” My sister, 40 something years old, thinks my mother could not have said that, and in an effort not to have those be the last words she hears her mother speak to her, says, “What Mum?” Giving my mother the chance to smile and say again “You have a really big bum”. Four or five siblings, a niece maybe, a cousin or two are in the room and we are not deaf nor dumbfounded. With the relief akin to sniper fire survivors, we giggled and snickered.
At the very end it was just my mother and myself. It was wonderfully conscious and peaceful, three times my mother smiled smiles I did not know were humanly possible, they were the definition of beatific. I don’t have any idea what follows this life if anything at all, but my often sharp mother’s death, it was holy.
So then what about those poems, love is always gentle and never unkind, blah, blah, blah. Is it possible that love is also like my mother and our gentle river that raised up and wailed us. A confluence of events occurred in the river’s core and we were in the way, hard as it to fathom, it wasn’t personal.
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