When my mother passed away in 2009, my sister received an email from Sister Maureen Murray, who had been my mother’s teacher at Marymount High School in Los Angeles. Sister Maureen remembered my mother as “the instigator of many pranks,” which did not surprise me at all. She ended the email with these words: “Remember she is as close as your breath.”
I have turned that sentence around in my mind for years. I originally took it to mean that she would come from the beyond and stay right next to me throughout my life. Her spirit would wrap itself around me when I needed her. And, maybe. I feel her presence all the time. She has the habit of leaving hearts in the bottom of my coffee cup and sending cardinals into my line of sight when I’m thinking of her. But what I’ve come to understand is that the love we receive, especially from our parents, becomes a part of us. We internalize the ways they showed their love, the things they always said. Their comfort becomes self-comfort. And that love, like our breath, is inside of us and outside of us all at once.
Which is all to say, I don’t want you to worry that I am hearing voices. I do talk to my mother in the car. I ask her for advice all the time, and I usually get something, not because she’s talking to me but because her voice is inside of me—I know exactly what she would have said. After all these years, her words of affirmation, her encouragement, and her humor are truly as close as my breath.