By Lisa
Today is Mother Mary’s birthday, which is both a sad and happy occasion, since she passed away in April.
Good grief.
It’s an interesting expression and applies perfectly, capturing completely the push and pull of emotions of a day like this, on which I’m mentally celebrating her life and mourning her passing.
In fact, it’s the paradox of death itself, which is losing somebody and loving them, both at the same time.
We don’t stop loving somebody just because they’re not around anymore.
And that’s true whether they’re in the next room, on a trip to Belize, or simply passed into another realm.
They’re away, but they’re here, both at once.
Time and space are conflated on a day like this, collapsed into one another, each crashing the other’s party.
At least that’s how I’ve been feeling, these seven months past her passing—which never really passes.
I’m not sure if this is the correct way to experience the death of a parent, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and it’s the same one I had ten years ago, when my father passed away.
To me, they’re both still here, and this is either sound mental health or the most merciful form of denial.
In any event, I’ll take it.
I have no choice.
And to be completely honest, it isn’t the way I thought it would be. I spent most of my life fearing the loss of my parents, because I was close to them both, but in different ways.
My father was fun-loving, smart, and warm, a benign presence in my life. He lived nearby and he was my go-to guy for advice, a sure laugh, or an outing to a movie. Father Frank would go anywhere, at any time. He was game and supremely easy to get along with. As a novelist, I know that actions describe character better than words, and the act that describes him perfectly is his habit of going to the movies on a Saturday night, around eight o’clock and buying a ticket for whichever movie he could see the most of at the time.
When he went to the movies, he went to the movies.
All of them, any one.
He never planned it, because it wasn’t his nature. He figured all the movies were pretty good, and he never met a movie or a person that he didn’t like.
Mother Mary, whom you know if you’ve read about her, was his exact opposite, which was probably why they were headed for divorce the day they married.
Another interesting conflation of time and space.
Another paradox.
Mother Mary was feisty, strong, and always ready to crack wise. She was a survivor of an impoverished childhood, the youngest of nineteen children. I won’t repeat the many stories about her herein, but because her personality was so much larger than her four-foot-eleven frame and her influence so pervasive, I would’ve expected her passing to leave a massive hole in my life, like a vacuum in space into which things disappeared, a void like a bottomless loss.
But that hasn’t happened at all.
Which is good for me and probably for the universe as a whole, because it sounded so scary.
I’m experiencing the loss of her, but the way I experienced the loss of my father. I’m not stricken, like a blow that leaves me reeling with the force of its impact, but it’s more like a fact of life—that runs alongside the fact of death.
She’s with me all the time even though she isn’t.
I don’t talk to her in my head, like other people do, but I hear her voice in my head and I know what she would say in any given situation.
Probably, so do you.
And if you have your mother plus Mother Mary in your head, I wish you luck.
People always joke that daughters become their mothers, and in my case, become their fathers too, and I think all of us embody the best of our parents.
And if we’re trying to live our lives the best way possible, we’re keeping what we loved about them and deleting the rest, like when a sure-handed editor goes over the first draft of the manuscript. The edited story morphs and changes, but the first draft—our mothers and our fathers—remain in the story, present behind the sentences themselves, and that essence abides always, never really going away.
And so we are, each of us, a book.
But no one of us is truly finished. We’re constantly rewriting ourselves, and the possibilities are limitless. We never know where our own narrative will lead, or which plot twist will come out which way.
It’s not The End.
We’re not in final draft, not while we draw breath.
So breathe in.
And keep writing.