Mother

Today’s blog in honor of Mother’s Day will seem strange to most. I have no doubt that I adore my mom and my grandmothers, and I would do anything to introduce them, to treasure them, to honor their memory. However, today I decided to write about the grief that many feel on this day. Nothing stings like Mother’s Day to a parent who has lost a child. “Oh, but you are a mother, oh, happy Mother’s Day, oh,I know today is hard—-“  all of these greetings hit the same sore spots in my heart. People should, however, have no fear in talking to bereaved mothers on Mother’s Day. We all appreciate their sympathy, their care, and their love. I just decided that today was a good day to look at my grief, to celebrate a little of my son‘s place in my life going forward, and to just say that he was the best, simply the best!

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​The model of my planning group is to write a better story. This is a beautiful motto because it is gentle, without being fluffy. It doesn’t scream productivity or perfection. It is more like setting a table for the life I mean to inhabit.

Imagining an ideal day works for me because I do think in scenes and atmospheres. Light and moonlight through a window, quilt folded, chairs waiting for company, cupcakes tucked away for surprises, dishes set and waiting for guests who don’t even know they will be here yet, a peaceful room echoing with laughter after everyone has gone home. I build a life in emotional snapshots.

So, if the picture in the mind is the destination, what supports it in real life?

There is something important about freedom and flexible time for me as a life planner. When there are zero external deadlines, life can start feeling shapeless unless I create gentle narrative structure myself – not rigid walls, but more like this:

•  this season’s focus

•  this month’s atmosphere

•  this week’s tending

•  today’s small step

Maybe I am shifting from praying to die each day, to surviving chaos in order to “go home,” to curating peace, to praying for a future, and to living for God.

Part of me feels like living a fuller life will dilute the horrifying reality of what happened. I wonder if it will soften the witness of the love I have for my son. If the rooms get cozy, if the dishes come out to set a pretty table, if there are plans for cupcakes, if fires glow in the fireplace, if I sit and look at Moonlight evenings, then the world will rule that this tragedy never happened to me at all. All parts of me say, “No! It really did happen! My son died. Something pivotal and vital was broken forever.” My life as a crumbled heap becomes, in a way, testimony of my loyalty and proof that I loved him. 

I know this is not true. I do not want or need daily, hourly, constant misery forever, but because grief can start to feel morally connected to love, it hurts so much. This suffering feels like the only emotion I have left, and it becomes the final service to perform to give my love room to land. However, a different truth lives in me – the one that notices beautiful windows with moonlight or thunder streaking through them, the one that thinks about ideal days, and how to capture their magic, the one who searches for beautiful in the everyday. That part is not betrayal either. I have to remember that my son celebrated and admired the joy we felt about the world.

This is my possibility in a choice between “collapse forever “and “completely heal.”  I can try to be a woman who is permanently changed by grief, but who gradually continues to build a life around the wound. Not moving on, but more like carrying love forward.

I never like to say what my son would want me to do, but with all I know about him – the moon chasing when he was little, the humor, the insight, the intensity of his soul – he would not appreciate to see his mom reduced to ashes in her chair. We were deeply alive and in tune with the joys and sorrows of the world. This connection had motion and life, observation and storytelling in it.

 

I am hoping the fact that I still notice and work toward laughter, beauty, and fairness is the strongest continuation of that bond.