Mom, I woke up this morning at 5:20 not knowing why so early. I got up, went to the living room, closed the bedroom door, and immediately booted up the laptop in a reflexive check-my-email kind of way. This of course sent me into eBay, bidding on a dance game that I’m trying to buy for my son, which got me to check for Wiggles concert dates. None scheduled in our area yet, but “keep checking back here.”
I then remembered my commitment to myself to use early-morning hours as a time to read (not easy for me to read). So, I picked up the current issue of the Nation and Progressive, flipped through, browsed the ads (mostly with pictures of George Bush looking like Hitler), and then, it hit me: My mom passed away at 5:20 am exactly 10 years ago.
I am not one to believe in an unequivocal way in the supernatural. I do believe that the mind is an amazing thing, and that it is possible I have held tenaciously to that memory of being called downstairs to my Mom’s bedroom early in the morning by the hospice nurse, quietly in her Jamaican accent, “She is gone. Your mother is gone. She passed peacefully.”
In my body is the memory of that slow-motion walk down the stairs, the viewing of my mom, emaciated, yellow, hairless, with her jaw open, but relaxed. My stroking her barely still warm leather hand saying over and over, “You be happy now, Mommy. You be happy now.” Because my Mom rarely was, and I so wanted that for her.
My sister Maggie is a true believer in the paranormal. She believed that when Mommy died, her father, Charles Blake (who had abandoned her and her sister when Mom was only 5) greeted her and took her into heaven. I love the idea of that, the absolute symmetry of earthly pain and heavenly bliss, but I’m not sure that our reality as humans can be constructed in quite the same way in the afterlife. Adopting a child has taught me that the longing for biological parental connections is largely a construct, fed by our “fertilocracy” and patriarchal attitudes about lineage and geology. True love and the longings it can fulfill are entirely in the heart, transcend biology. So, I would prefer she be greeted, not by someone about whom she held the illusion of “being loved” when the action that is love was absent, begging the question, but rather by a more integrated sense of the universe holding her in its hands without a persona, without a face, with only a heart, for that is all that holds us anyway.
I have tried so hard to put faces on what I love, to define it. Then, once I do, I long for the face to change, to be different, for the nature of the love I crave changes from moment to moment. The dreamy charmer that married me became the fool that wants to go back to college. So, I have needed to decide if the nature of my love for this fool is deep enough to sustain the fact that circumstances change. In the past, I have chosen to leave, as my grandfather did, in pursuit of something that seemed more lasting, more enduring, as the primordial ooze of initial passion always does. But the primordial ooze goes beyond romantic love, and I’m assuming my grandfather just didn’t know that. I’ve also heard he was a bit of a dolt.
So I stay, because I know that damage that can be wreaked when a family splits up. I know the transient nature of romantic love, the shape-shifting of the objects of our love. I know how horribly imperfect a vessel each of us is for love that is more eternal, with me at the top of the list of the imperfect (and my grandfather probably a close second). The truth is, I believe my Mom longed for her father as a stand-in for something greater. We are all stand-ins for something greater. Some of us are just better cast in the part.
My husband is one of those people. I’ve never seen anyone more willing to look at himself, see what’s working and what’s not, and strive, day to day, minute to minute, to become better at the act of love. Sure, he’s the fool that wanted to go back to school. But fools make the world go round, they stay when it would be more glamorous to leave, they love when it would be more expedient to let go. I guess I married my Mom, not my grandfather, which is a good thing.
But, when I die, as I long so deeply to see my Mother, I think that I will be content to see, touch, and finally inhabit that for which she has been the most compelling stand-in in this my earthly life: eternal love. That is what I wish for her, for Charles, for all whom I love.
And, Mom, while I’m at it, just a note: Your grandson, Blake, named for you, is the most delightful boy in the world. You taught me well, Mom. You didn’t leave. You hung in there with a life that was full of pain. You stayed, and did the work that love is. You were always an embrace, always a sure thing, even with the warts and all. After you died, I imagined you and Daddy, floating above my bed, shedding coats, and becoming pure light. I think of that image a lot. Of how you were finally in a state where the defenses and boundaries of human intercourse are no longer needed, where all is one.
I hope you are there, Mommy. I miss you so. I just miss you so much. I love you.




