Dear Mom:
I realize that on days like Mother’s Day people tend to wax nostalgic, venerating those Mom’s among us who have passed. It is, I suppose, a way to express both our deep respect and enduring gratitude, while somehow holding you a bit closer in heart and mind since we can no longer hold you in our arms.
Mom, you are missed more than the reach of words and the span of syntax can hope to explain. Yet if it were our choice, if your three boys had the power and authority to choose, even then we would not wish you here for you are truly home in a truly perfect and inexplicable way.
Mom, your voice here is now muted, heard only in our hearts, our memories, and throughout the grand halls of heaven. Even so, we still hear it. And when it fades in the frequently stifling noise of life, we play it over in our minds so as not to forget it. Your wisdom
now arises from the many footprints
youleft across the landscape of our lives, examples that speak life and truth and love and ceaseless hope into both the barren places, as well as those places wonderful
lush that we walk through daily. Your
touch is lost to us, those simple hugs from
a simple woman who not only knew how to love, but how to express it in a way that made each moment warm and safe. It is one thing to be loved. It is quite another to know that you are loved. We knew. And now standing so many years removed from your passing, we still know.
But Mom, in the balance we have gained infinitely more. You left a legacy in our lives; a robust legacy that embodies integrity, honesty and tenacity. A brave legacy that boldly, even brashly believes that God always provides, always cares, always knows and is an ever-present source from which every need will always be met. You helped us understand that life ebbs and flows, sometimes magically and sometimes cruelly. You showed us that life at times invites us to a grand dance, and at other times it seems to slam us to the dance floor leaving us cringing and bleeding. Life pours into us, and then it draws out of us. The sun at times warms us and then the hail pelts us. In whatever form it takes, you taught us that God always prevails, that there is always good, that it will always, always work out. And it always did.
You left us an unrelenting understanding that life is more than some daily routine, or the achievement of tasks either great or small. Life is about living well, living with respect, living in a manner that adds rather than detracts. It is not about pretending things are well or being Pollyannaish. You taught us that life is about understanding that things will not always be fair nor will life necessarily be just, but in the hands of God it will always present us with opportunities to learn about ourselves, to grow and to add something to those around us.
Mom, all of these lessons came packaged in simple things like iced tea on sweltering summer days and hot chocolate on frigid winter nights. It was bedtime prayers that started “now I lay me down to sleep . . .” It was endless lunches packed for school, dimes tucked in lunch boxes for white milk during the week and chocolate milk on Friday’s. It was planting flowers in Spring’s sweet soils, and canning fruit when Fall generously yielded up the bounty born of those soils. It was wrapping us thick in mounds of coats and lengthy scarves when winter drew nature to sleep, and vacuuming the pool when the glory of summer ran and skipped through our days. It was summed up in a tiny plaque that still hangs in the kitchen which reads, “Bless this house oh Lord we pray, make it safe by night and day.” Such was your life.
11