Remembrance

I held a small ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of my mom. I wasn't sure how well it would be received or attended, but I really felt like I needed to do something. It has been so long without her.
I had seen many years ago that Hawaii started a lantern floating ceremony on Memorial Day that looked so peaceful and beautiful. People write messages to loved ones and then float them off the coast of the beach. I wanted to try and recreate something like that for my mom. I think it was a wonderful success. The evening started off with a sun dog appearing in the sky, and a small breeze sent all the lanterns with their messages safely to the other side of the lake.
It was a beautiful evening surrounded by friends and family. I feel incredibly lucky to have so many people still here to remember her by. I'm hoping to try and do it again sometime, to keep her memory alive.

Breaking Through

“I am not what i have done. I am what i have overcome.”

May 7th, Mother’s Day weekend, I ran my first 5K with my husband. We wore orange in honor of my mother, we stuck together as we dodged through the strollers, and walkers, and dancers, and kids. My husband even got hit with a spraying can of beer. But we did it. I did it. Asthma and all. For her. For me. For the fact that I am still here breathing, even though the pain can still take my breath away.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy.

65

Happy Birthday to you

Still lost without you

I just keep pushing forward

And try to live for you too

Nineteen Years

"Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?" ~Unknown

Nineteen years

Since you left this place.

Since I’ve held your hand.

Seen your face.

Days go by

Disjointed at best.

Inured, eviscerated

Within the same breath.

I never thought

I could carry on

But here we are…..

Nineteen years already gone.

Joyful Joyful - How I Miss Thee

"You're the one I want to be with, you're the reason that I came. And you'll find Me in the stillness as I'm whispering your name." ~Anon

The stockings seem much emptier,
The tree looks not as green.
The carols sound so out of tune,
And the traditions have just become routine.

I've relived all my memories
Of the twenty-fifth of December
To try and find whats missing now,
From the Christmases I remember.

Its not a certain flavor
Or a gift beneath the tree,
But more that special feeling
the season once brought to me.

After years of searching high and low,
through woods, on beaches, in shops, and pews,
I'm almost sure that what I'm missing
Is sharing Christmastime with you.

With you the season came alive,
A wonderland in any weather.
Its something I've lost bit by bit
Since we last were together.

Gifts and shopping hold no thrill,
I've no pride in well done decorations.
I still roll the cookies and pour the eggnog,
But I just don't feel much celebration.

What was the wellspring you possessed
That renewed your spirit from year to year?
I miss the peace, the joy, the laughter,
The successful missions spreading yuletide cheer.

Its still and cold this Christmas Eve,
The sky is dressed with its brilliant lights.
As I turn my face up to the stars,
I think of you, and send my love tonight.

And if you could still send me a gift
To open as tomorrow comes,
Please help me find that joy, that hope,
For this Christmas and for future ones.

Illuminati

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My depression most often makes me feel isolated. Unreachable. Unrelatable. Its the hardest type of battle because the entire time I’m feeling so cut off, the knowledge is there in the back of my mind that this is a prison of my own making. Not purposefully, but nonetheless. I know that the shadows and darkness I live in aren’t real, but constructed by my head. Yet, the invisible wall separating me from the rest of the world still seems unbreachable to me. Until there are instances that make me feel like I’m at the end of a light tube. When the moment of connecting to something or someone kindred to me beams in like sunshine of the outside world reflected in off of a series of mirrors to illuminate me internally inside the dark little cave in my mind.

This was posted a week before my Mother’s birthday - but I didn’t see it until months later, until after passing the anniversary of her death. I was true to my promise from years before, and planted a garden that day. Trying to use the anniversary of her death as a day to remember to celebrate life instead of dwell on the loss. But I still have been walking around numb and isolated until I read this; a letter Joan Carpenter’s daughter, Karin Cook, wrote to her mother over a decade after she passed. Another mother, another daughter, another lifetime. But the pain, the love, the loss, the uncertainty are all the same. Transcending the differences between us and uniting me to her, if only for a few minutes.

Dear Mom,

What time was I born?

When did I walk?

What was my first word?

My body has begun to look like yours. Suddenly I can see you in me. I have so many questions. I look for answers in the air. Listen for your voice. Anticipate. Find meaning in the example of your life. I imagine what you might have said or done. Sometimes I hear answers in the echo of your absence. The notion of mentor is always a little empty for me. Holding out for the hope of you. My identity has taken shape in spite of that absence. There are women I go to for advice. But advice comes from the outside. Knowing, from within. There is so much I don't know.

What were your secrets?

What was your greatest source of strength?

When did you know you were dying?

I wish I had paid closer attention. The things that really matter you gave me early on—a way of being and loving and imagining. It's the stuff of daily life that is often more challenging. I step unsure into a world of rules and etiquette, not knowing what is expected in many situations. I am lacking a certain kind of confidence. Decisions and departures are difficult. As are dinner parties. Celebrations and ceremony. Any kind of change. Small things become symbolic. Every object matters—that moth-eaten sweater, those photos. Suddenly I care about your silverware. My memory is an album of missed opportunities. The loss of you lingers.

Did you like yourself?

Who was your greatest love?

What did you fear most?

In the weeks before your death, I knew to ask questions. At nineteen, I needed to hear your hopes for me. On your deathbed, you said that you understood my love for women, just as you suggested you would have fought against it. In your absence, I have had to imagine your acceptance.

There are choices I have made that would not have been yours. Somehow that knowledge is harder for me than if I had you to fight with. My motions lack forcefulness. I back into decisions rather than forge ahead. This hesitancy leaves me wondering:

Did you ever doubt me?

Would you have accepted me?

What did you wish for me?

I know that my political choices threatened you. Your way was to keep things looking good on the outside, deny certain feelings, erase unpleasant actions. Since your death, I have exposed many of the things that you would have liked to keep hidden. I can no longer hold the family secrets for you.

I search for information about your life. Each scrapbook, letter, anecdote I come across is crucial to my desire to understand you and the choices you made. I have learned about affairs, abuse, all things you would not have wanted me to know. Yet they explain the missing blanks in my memory bank and round out your humanity.

Who did you dream you would be?

Did you ever live alone?

Why did you divorce?

Did you believe in God?

One thing you said haunts me still. When I asked about motherhood, you said that children don't need as much as you gave. "Eighty percent is probably plenty." I was shocked by your words. Did you regret having given so much of yourself? Now, those words seem like a gift. A way of offering me a model of motherhood, beyond even your own example.

Becoming a mother is something I think about a great deal, almost to the point of preoccupation. I have heard it said that constant dreaming about birth often signals a desire to birth one's self, to come into one's own. My process of grieving the loss of you has been as much about birthing myself as letting you go.

What were your last thoughts?

Were you proud?

Were you at peace?

What is it like to die?

How frightened you must have been shouldering so much of your illness alone. The level of your own isolation is a mystery to me. In my life, I try hard to reach out, to let others in. I fear loss more than anything. I turn on my computer. Make things up. I tell the truth. My daily work is toward connection. All these questions move me to search, less and less for your answers and increasingly for my own.

Love,

Karin

“My process of grieving the loss of you has been as much about birthing myself as letting you go.” I never thought one little sentence could embrace me so completely. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be understood, truly empathized with, instead of just pitied and consoled. And just like that I can remember myself. Light pours in, and I can see a way to go on. Up. Out of the darkness.

Thank you for the light.

Paying for Permanence

You may lose your most valuable property through misfortune in various ways.  You may lose your house, your wife and other treasures.  But of your moko, you cannot be deprived except by death.  It will be your ornament and companion until your last day.  ~Netana Whakaari

My mother's Grace Kelly photo

As an adult myself, most of my regrets about my mother are about never knowing her as a grownup. I was right on that cusp of learning all about her past and fleshing her out as a 3 dimensional human being when she passed, so all I'm stuck with is my childhood perception of a woman whose favorite color was orange, loved to teach and to sing, and hated anything that tasted like raspberries.
I might be biased, but I think it makes an impact on your self image when you really have no archetype to guide yourself by growing up besides the airbrushed models in a magazine. Getting older now is even harder.Choosing clothing becomes an exercise in toeing the line between kosher and Cougartown. Its not like high school when you knew what not to wear. Over one hundred fellow classmates created quite the learning standard. Nowadays I just follow the rule of keeping as covered as possible while I try to keep up the New Year's resolution of exercising and eating better. And most days I wish I had my mother to talk to, because I know she would empathize with me. I imagine her growing older more gracefully than my blind man's stumble I've got going on. She had already mastered Weight Watchers, and Mary Kay, and how to apply Loving Care by the time she was my age. And thinking about this reminded me of a happy discovery many years back.
For her 43rd birthday, she got Glamour Shots done for herself as a gift. I remember this distinctly, because she was very dissatisfied with her looks and her weight. And she left for her appointment grumbling that she didn't think they'd be able to make her look any younger. I thought she looked like a movie star, and fell in love with one of the proofs that she didn't have printed. As a surprise, she had the proof copied for me and presented it to me in a frame. After she died I wanted to re-frame it and was surprised to discover an inscription on the back.

Just recently, while being dissatisfied with my own self image, I remembered about the whole thing; the pictures, her grumblings, and the gift with the surprise message on the back. I realized this would be a perfect memory to keep in my face day to day. Not only my mother's love, but her whole perception about love and beauty. Maybe I was the influence for her that made her decide that middle age wasn't as bad as she thought. Perhaps her eleven year old daughter's adoration over her looking like Grace Kelly made her feel better about herself. I'd like to hope so. And I'd like to remind myself that, every day. So, I concluded it was time to do something for myself that would make me feel beautiful, and decided to get her words inked on my arm as a tattoo. A permanent message to serve as my reminder that not only am I loved from above, but that my own daughter is watching me, and seeing, too. If anything I need to keep my eyes open and upward for her. To try and remember to see myself through her eyes. Hopefully it will help me be kinder to myself as well.
Missing my mother is an evolving beast. I've gotten over it in some areas, substituted in most, and still wallow in a personal pity party in one deep, buried, corner of my emotional closet.  Its also hard not having many tangible things to remember her by. My sentimentality about objects didn't kick in until after she was gone, so I never kept birthday cards or the little notes in my lunchbox she used to leave me. But this I can carry with me. Not just in my heart, or my memories, but as a part of me. Solid, beautiful, and permanent.

The Memory Project

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.  ~The Wonder Years

Today marks sixteen years passed, and while I was thinking last week of what I wanted to do to try and celebrate my mother, I realized I'm facing a new challenge born from her death. My children don't really know their Nana.

Monkey is usually the one who tries to guess her identity in pictures, but Scootch doesn't recognize her at all. He's convinced its always funny pictures of me. I tell them as many stories as I can, but since I only really knew her as a child myself, it isn't much. I have plenty of pictures of when she was a child, but once she became the photographer of the family there are very few occasions where her face filled the frame. So my idea is really a call for help.
I want to make my children a memory book of their Nana. My mother touched so many lives, and knew so many people. I'm hoping that I can petition for everyone to share a remembrance or a photo of her and I can print them into a book that will share her life and (mis)adventures of her adult years. Hopefully it will help my children learn why certain things they do make me laugh and tell them they're just like their Nana. Or why sometimes a certain smile or way they tilt their head makes my heart squeeze. They carry her within them everywhere. I hope this will help them know it.

That Old Familiar Feeling

"We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death. And loss, strangely, can attune you to what is beautiful about existence even as it wounds you with what is awful." ~Meghan O'Rourke

Distance lends perspective. It surprises me to come back to where I once was, and have the ability to discern changes or gain understanding. It surprises me more when I can turn that around and recognize an element of myself in someone else. I suppose if that didn't happen, I'd be useless. Never learning anything or being able to improve my outcomes. I find this happening alot lately, emotionally. I had anxiety. I slugged through depression. I got treatment. Got better. And now that I'm off the medication I can recognize I'm getting worse. Since I've tasted life without that shroud clouding my thoughts, its so much harder to resign myself to it again. But what is also eye opening to me is how well I'm doing, considering the circumstances.

Back when I was in therapy, I remember the doctor telling me that she thought most of the issues I was experiencing were due to the unresolved emotional trauma I endured from the loss of my mother. Funny thing about losing someone is that its never truly "resolved." Its more of an ever evolving trauma, constantly reshaping itself and able to wound you repeatedly through life. Like an emotional Prometheus, my heart gets ripped out every time I approach another milestone. As today marks a tipping point in my life, I'm a little surprised at my current perspective. I lost my mother fifteen years ago, just 2 weeks shy of my fifteenth birthday. From now on I will be living without her longer than I knew her.

Two years ago, even last year, I was dreading this day. I was terrified of what I would be feeling, of how it might distort my views of my mother, or myself. But consciously, or unconsciously, I've been taking small steps to already start walking that distance. I decided I needed to start living with her memory, and not just the memory of her loss. Last Christmas - it helped that I was busy with the arrival of Little Bear - I only let myself dwell on her absence once on Christmas Eve. And in doing so it was by singing a song for her. This Mother's Day, I celebrated her by doing a painting project which I know she would have approved of, instead of trekking to the shore to commiserate for an hour or two on the fact that she wasn't here so I could give her a card. I want my kids to know what the essence of their Nana was like, not just know that she's gone. I still want to love her, but I want to do it by having my kids learn to love hearing about her in stories, or seeing her in pictures. And I'm amazed that I'm seeing this all from an even level, and not from the bottom of the emotional hole I usually find myself in when unmedicated. I feel like I'm meeting the pain halfway. Almost like I'm familiar with it, can somewhat predict its movements and mannerisms, and maybe even be a bit welcoming to it, because I know it will move on. I feel the need to reassure others when I recognize the pain they're enduring in their own lives. Not that I'm the poster child for recovery, but hopefully my sympathy might make their own load a little more bearable. Shared pain is half the pain, right?

Standing here, looking back and looking forward, I can still see the future is stretching so much further than my past. But from this perspective it doesn't seem to look as looming as it once did.

Happy Birthday

3-14.
Another year goes by.
Those old raw feelings break back through.
Overwhelm me.
No matter how good I’m doing. How ‘healed’ I am.
And so I should celebrate the day that breathed your life into the world, even after that sweet air has been snatched away from me.
My exhale only lends a hint of what your presence lent to this place.
And fate, in her calm exacting way, piles many more blessings on such a significant date.
Is it wrong that they still don’t add up to fill the hole?
The gaping raw chasm that echoes with my loss.
The emptiness that was previously filled with you.

I need you.
Crave your voice. Your touch. Your guidance.
I miss the sweet whispers that floated into my ears in my dreams.
I look into the faces of my babies, and I’m at a loss as to how I can keep you alive for them.
I search their looks, their smiles, not for my resemblance, but yours.
How can I be complete as their mother, while I have none to complete myself?
How do I rise from the dark mists that pull me under?
Unable to rise like a phoenix, because the dampness smothers the sparks that would kindle me.
Reluctant to look towards a future devoid of your face.
Still trying, in vain, to brace myself for a life untold to you.
Hoping my endurance will help me survive.

The Science of Solace

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight.... Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

It has not been a good past few days.

The mood swings from my lack of meds is frightening. The kids are wound up tighter, most likely due to the beautiful weather outside and their lack of playing in it. And on Tuesday it was my birthday. Not just any birthday, but the last birthday before I cross that prime meridian in my mind where I will be on this Earth for more years without my mother than I will have knowing her. My personal Y2K crisis.

But its things like this that really bring home how much I'm missing my mother.


Fallen cupcakes might not make much sense to you, but my mother was both a baker and a scientist. When the cookies came out flat she knew that I needed to add more flour. When my boxed cake didn't come out right, she could tell I was being impatient and didn't mix it for the whole 2 minutes the package directs. When she fell in love with a batch of orange muffins while we were on vacation, she went home and made up a recipe for them. She knew relationships that existed between baking powders and sodas and salts and flours, and I was content as a child to be honored when I was allowed to lick the beaters.

How I wish back for that lab time now. There isn't a recipe that I try to make for Scootch that has come out right yet. Pancakes, boxed cakes, scratch cakes. Modified, fortified, and verbatim. They all crumble, fall, or fail to rise at all. I used to love baking. My husband used to brag I was good at it. But lately it just feels like I'm failing a midterm anytime I lug out the Kitchen Aid. And as much as everyone is sympathetic, I just have this feeling that if my mom were here, she would fix it. She would HAVE a recipe that wouldn't fail me. Possibly multiple ones at this point. In all kinds of flavors so her grandson wouldn't be missing out on what red velvet or devil's food cake did to your tongue.

My only small solace is this;



At least she left me the means to still decorate my disasters.

Celebrate Memories

My mother's name was Christine. She was the oldest of three children. Her favorite color was orange, and her favorite place to be was the beach. She hated anything raspberry and her favorite flavor of ice cream was Moose Tracks. Her favorite drink was Southern Comfort. My mother loved being a teacher, and said her favorite grade to teach was 3rd because "they were old enough to know how to listen, and young enough to still respect you." I think I'll always remember that she kept a jar of pretzel rods in her classroom that I would raid every time I was there. My mother liked to paint, although I never saw her do it growing up. Her paintings hung in our house and at my grandparents. My mother liked to cook and bake, and loved to make cakes for people's special events. I have a box full of pictures of her creations for weddings, Court of Honors, baby showers, baptisms, communions, and birthdays. My mother was good at photography, and used to turn our bathroom into a darkroom so she could develop her own film and pictures. My father even modified an old countertop so it would fit over our bathtub so she had a place to set up the tubs for the developer, stop bath, and fixer. I still remember the smell of the developer on her hands after she'd hole up in there for hours. My mother used to clean with bleach and water, and so I remember that smell on her hands too. My mother always had cold feet, and she hated it. She was a perfectionist, and would agonize over details, just like I do.

My mother lost her mother before I was born. She liked her tea with no milk because she gave it up for me when I was nursing and couldn't handle dairy. Every equinox my mother would get up early and stand a bunch of eggs on their ends so we'd see them when we woke up in the morning. My mother wore perfume, but she usually just used scented lotion. I remember it was called Chantilly, and I'd buy her the biggest bottle they had at Macy's for her every year for Christmas. My mother loved music, and loved to sing. She could play fantastically complicated pieces on the piano even thought she insisted she had "sausage fingers" and not "piano hands." My mother taught me the harmony to "You Are My Sunshine" and we would sing it in the car together. My mother's nails never got very long, and she always admired that I could grow mine out. My mother loved animals, and always kept something in the house with us; dogs, fish, rabbits, birds, hamsters, and even let me keep a newt I found when we were camping one summer. I remember that I was convinced she could communicate with the birds especially, since they would listen to her sing around the house with rapt attention. (I remember that my father would always grumble about our pets, but was always the one bringing home the jumbo rawhides, or surprising us by fashioning screen tops for our creature enclosures.) I remember her putting our rabbits into bed with us to wake us up in the mornings.

During Lent, my mother tried in vain to get us to eat fish on Fridays, and would even buy stuff like dolphin fish and shark fillets to try and tempt us to eat it. My mother used to make liver for me to eat because I was anemic and hated taking my iron pills. She also had a rule about eating a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter for dinner if we refused to eat our meal. I remember my mother showing me that "iron fortified" cereal meant that they put iron flakes in it, by crushing the cereal up in a glass of water and stirring it with a magnet so all the iron pulled out of the food.

My mother would talk or yell through her clenched teeth when she was really angry, but she always had her "telephone voice" ready at a moments notice. I remember that my mother had a bad temper, but would work to control it by biting her own tongue. I remember she would always gripe that the car only broke down when she was wearing a white shirt. My mother liked to spin out on snowy backroads on purpose to keep her driving skills sharp, even though I screamed in terror the entire time in the backseat. And yesterday while my family was riding in the car together I was given the gift of another memory of my mother. I remember that I loved how the bumps felt in the car while I was riding in the way back, and so my mother would swerve and dip into each one while we were alone in the car together and I would rate each one on its "bumpiness."

I remember that today is my mother's birthday. And I remember that she hasn't been around to celebrate it for 14 years. The picture above is the last photo I ever took of my mother, and I like to remember that at the time I snapped it, we were both smiling.