When is it appropriate for you to celebrate Mother’s Day? Could you handle the commemoration now? Is it the right time? Would you mind choosing, accepting, wearing a carnation, a rose or a tulip, whose pristine whiteness sounds your private pain, instead of a blood-red one, whose elite color is assigned to those whose mothers can still be hugged?
To “commemorate”: How leaden that sounds, so heavy, historic, ancient, cold, as if the sooty touch of death had stripped our lives centuries ago, and not just, as it feels, a turbulent moment ago. Must he intrude, now, on a particular season, for a month, on a day, when his heart shudders at the thought? Many countries celebrate public holidays at disparate times. How about you do it?
What is your mother’s birthday or a touching anniversary? What is your favorite day of the week? Exercise? Philosophy? poem? Song? Artworks? Dessert?
To greet our mothers, and the unrecognized mother-type figures in our lives, let’s reflect: Why buy a carnation, if your mother liked lilies? Why the second week of May, if your mother’s soul danced at the sight of the leafy burning mounds, during the glorious Autumns?
What can be the best gift we offer, despite the sadness that surrounds us? I feel safe suggesting that the unconditional essence of Love, also known as almost all mothers, would make a request. It would be that the suffering progeny of Love would release a deep sadness, or at least not exacerbate it. If such an offering requires avoiding a one-size-fits-all Mother’s Day, so be it.
We can truly revere our mothers by retrieving, a sign of their inherited resilience, their strength, within us. I think back to several years ago, according to my family, when almost everything we had was demolished by Hurricane Charley. Mildly cognitive, my mother surveyed our debris: the jumble of walls, the car, the roof, the memorabilia, half of my framed diploma, the clothes, the grapefruit tree, her heirloom piano, the bookshelves on the deck, the Mashed encyclopedia pages, newly purchased books. groceries, a backyard chair, a tool shed on top of the pool, the neighbor’s ladder, the street sign, our lawnmower astride the overturned washing machine. She turned to me and warned me hesitantly but with clear intent that we were alive, that it hadn’t been a tragedy for us, but “just an annoying adventure.” How wise. How evident, too, her courageous determination.
Call on your innate resilience. Avoid a premature casual acceptance of studied joviality. Let’s cherish a “breathing spell” to deal with the feeling of being stranded, the embryonic abandonment that induces the single main emotion, grievance. According to adults, not needing your mother never negates her longing for her.
Perhaps your mother savored the traditional collective consecration nested in Springtime. Perhaps she had enjoyed the fuss, the unwieldy corsage on her chest, or the reservation errors at the restaurant, forcing a noisy, jostling wait by the cashier’s desk, or the crowded car ride to and from the festivities. .
Since my mother’s passing, I’ve realized something incipient: During Mother’s Day gatherings, she never commented on the day itself, nor did she speak of her mother or her beloved grandmother, who taught her word of mouth. Old country, spoon-to-pan peasant cooking.
Growing up, I took the annual rite for granted, immersed in pride, watching my mother as she murmured each letter on the skinny cardboard signs with ragged letters. Oblivious to the disparity between my Mother’s Day experience and hers.
Now I know: mothers whose own mothers have passed away masterfully juggle two conflicting worlds. There is the joy of letting your children feel the sanctity of giving, and of appreciating the opportunity for the family to stack up. Yet many honorees wield, undetected, the Spartan skill of holding tight to a separate and simultaneous emotion of searing pain brought on by missing one’s deceased mother that day, and perhaps, every day. As our mothers did, many of us can now walk a similar path, shielding the joy of our immediate family from the inner melancholy of our fathers’ absence. Perhaps we can introduce a new, empathic tradition of giving up, if necessary, the obligatory emotional duality.
What else can encourage us? May I whisper an item close to my mother’s heart and mine: the afterlife? If, echoing my instincts, you feel that your mother is still alive, how does that faith apply to Mother’s Day?
It stimulates courage. It encourages us to seek optimal healing, because we trust that our mother thrives. The waterproofing protected me the last months of my mother’s earthly life. I refused to reflect, I would not accept that my mother would die soon. I also couldn’t imagine the fissure in my soul that her departure would powerfully exploit. The reality: Alzheimer’s had cleaved with the sullen elegance of lightning, her psyche, her daily behavior, producing a fractured child-mother withering under the heated hardness of charred brain cells. The mathematical rigor of Alzheimer’s had reduced the jumping of nerve endings, the frolicking of noisy cells from synapse to synapse, and multiplied the fragments of once-cohesive memory, and as a final push, added a sharp physical pain. Her illness kept whispering to me of her imminent death. I listened but I didn’t want to listen. In a self-styled passive-deprecating state, I resigned myself to impermanence, to generality, but discarded specificity, that here, now, towards my house, Death was rushing with foamy speed. At the moment of my mother’s departure, a current of electrified horror sizzled through my marrow. That she could walk away, that she was actually giving up meat, was as shocking as if she had abruptly crashed into a bus and spun off of it, or that I had.
It would not be, I confessed, partial to pablum, devouring a tale of happily ever after. Don’t befriend sentimentality either, settling for the crumbs of the photographic gaze. I hid those teasing images. In the rawness of the pain, we are desperate, are we not, to escape from a world of negatively biased answers, dictates, methodologies in which we have immersed ourselves:
How not to exhaust yourself, in misery How not to waste yourself by not eating How not to annoy others who have moved faster, without problems How not to laugh, because it feels offensive, so that dawn slips under the window of pain that we have drawn flush with the sill. How not to think about his suffering, his death, his absence. Gradually, though, through the wee hours and midnights, he prayed because not praying was intolerable. When I focused, I mean, if I could reenergize to come up with some jagged thoughts, that looked passably like a sentence, an affirmation, something between the two of us, it was to blurt out, “I was in denial about his death, don’t let me stay in denial of your life. His new and continuing vitality, his immortal spirit, that is.
Somehow, as the weeks melt away, a hope flickers, not exactly a flame, but a definite step from flamelessness. A burning hope for its continuity has exploded in a doomed mind. A nagging inner sense of divine benevolence keeps prompting me to cheer.
There is a stronger law of tort than the scientific claim that nature rushes in to fill a void. The gap that chisels the grievance will never be closed. Life will never get better — how could it? My mother’s death shattered the delicate yin-yang balance of the universe for me. Truly, “the center cannot stand”, Yeats’s pours reverberate within me.
Life will never feel so blessed, but more and more I experience it becoming sacred, again. Fascinating, humorous, magical, exhilarating, light-hearted, but not enhanced. Different. A difference that I do not want but that I will deign to ally. But always, “where you left, a hole in the universe appears”, as Edna St. Vincent Millay says confidentially.
This is what I reflect on: that my mother was, is and remains a person, that her structural integrity, her totality of identity, of being an individual remains intact. I trust that she has expanded her consciousness, now free of the finite and demolished brain. If, as innumerable poets exclaim, she is one with the wind, the foam of the sea, the dew-covered grasses, the doves of the air, the sky, it is because she has always been part of the universe, like me, connected with everything that it is. . Nothing has changed to negate my individualization. In her case, she only intensifies, as she polishes virtue, sharpens artistic insight and expression.
The pain gap proves to be an unlocked door for energy exchange, where we are radiating love to the Mother, and she generously transmits love back. I experience this in quiet moments, emerging energized.
Therefore, I grope for the belief in an afterlife, precisely because of a matrix factor that improves probability theory. I have a mother. I know my mother. She, and I can tell others too, simply would not allow such a thing as the cessation of life. They treasure us too much, like us, them. Motherly Love finds a way, stumbles upon the secret path or alchemical elixir or “…a stone, a leaf, a door unfound,” as Thomas Wolfe wrote. Our mothers would master, beyond Houdini, how to swing above the hangover trying to pull them into a collective unconsciousness. I feel them awake, vigilant, soldiers to our hearts. The mothers have worked too much, and if anyone deserves, without the monotony of reincarnational turns, a self-aware eternal life, it is each one of them; the universe would not dare to extinguish them on an indifferent whim. If an afterlife had never “existed”, some struggling mother on earth would have forced Divinity to create it.
I don’t want to remember my mother; I want to reciprocate, relate to her, communicate. With a brisk cadence, my heart beats, “she lives, she loves,” and memory must give way to vitality, to the normalcy of continuous dialogue through ironic silent meditation. It seems that we meet, her and I, in the synaptic cleft between earth and sky, always signaling love for each other. I want to hold tight to the reconnected spiritual umbilical cord, which I had sometimes forgotten is ours forever.
Memory has its place. When I wake up in that vestal Sunday dawn that doesn’t go out, maybe I’ll remember, as I sometimes do, an anecdote. Once, my mother told me about her happy and beautiful Mother’s Day, “the best of all”, when she was rushed to the hospital, where in her womb, merrily. Happy Mother’s Day, Dear, the archetype in my life of Italian Motherhood, affectionate request. Here’s a bouquet, your prized wild cornflowers, bright blue to match your eyes, a few strands of corn strewn on top, reflecting the light shade of your hair, during your prime, your blessedly long blooming season. Also, Mother, a complexion. It’s red.
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