Happy Mother’s Day

She died on a July afternoon at 3pm. It was peaceful and expected and she was in her own bed. Her husband of 72 years, my Dad and my sister were bedside on her right, I was on her left.  There were things to be done in the immediate aftermath. Call hospice. Call family members. Bathe and dress her one last time. Her body was still warm. The undertakers came. I watched them take her body out of the room. I looked away when they were about to zip up the black bag.  As the hearse pulled away down the drive a great clap of thunder rang out.

I remember wondering at about 5pm through my heaving sobs where I would find her again and where I would see her beautiful blue eyes again? My computer was still playing the song list I’d built for Mom. It was a long list and one we’d listened to almost non stop over her last months. Just then, the Pat Metheny song, Find Me In Your Dreams came on.  It did not seem like an accident.

A little while later the rain had stopped and I stepped outside. Looking up at a bright blue sky, there, I thought, that’s where I’ll see her blue eyes. Mom was everywhere.

Today, on Mother’s Day five years after her death she still is everywhere as is the ongoing expression of her love.  It’s as if her mothering essence was absorbed into the Great Mother Spirit in the sky to become yet another facet of its majesty. I see that loving spirit in the tender touch of a Mother to her child in it’s pram.  I feel it as a Mother, seated next to me on the plane, reads to her young child. I smile over it as yet another Mom explains to her hungry young son what they will have for dinner tonight in a passing conversation on the street.  I experience it in the pollen carrying wind. Mother love lives on.