Along the boardwalk that spans the wetlands at my local park, small streaks of silver line the branches of the pussy willow shrubs. They transport me back to my family’s house where they were harbingers of spring, of the renewal of life. My mother would find some boughs of the soft gray velvety buds and place them along with a few daffodils in a pitcher on our dining room table.
Two years ago today, my mother died. It wasn’t a dramatic end, more of a letting go after 97 years of a rich life lived on three continents. For the previous ten years, I had talked, visited, shopped, cooked with her as needed, culminating in an intense three months of helping her move to assisted living. Every morning, I would call Stella, our previous golden retriever, and ask her if she wanted to go to Grandma’s. She’d run to the front door and we’d drive the familiar road to Greencroft, the local retirement community, pull into the driveway, then walk to the door to find my mother finishing her morning coffee. We slowly went through every room in the house, making piles for trash, for family, for the second hand shop. As I handled each item, my mother would often tell a story about it. Since she and my father had lived in Belgium, Scotland, the Ivory Coast and the U.S., you can imagine the tales I heard. This item came from someone they had helped after the Second World War, that one from the church bazaar in Aberdeen, these towels were a gift from my great grandmother, this painting from a nephew of our Belgian friend. In both French and English, I heard old stories and new stories, about her and about my father.
Over those months, as I listened to the stories of her life, asked questions, sometimes hard ones, about choices she made or situations she encountered, relived parts of my childhood through her eyes, I came to a true understanding and acceptance of our relationship as mother and daughter. And, as was always the case in our family, we hugged many times. We also cried and laughed hard but the under current was always love.
My siblings and I moved her into her new apartment a month before Covid hit. I tried to configure the new space so that it would feel just like the one she had left. In those later years, I believed she deserved all the comforts and pampering of a life well lived. I brought her flowers, made her granola and pastries, stocked her cupboard with her favorite drinks and sweets.
When her time came, the hardest part for me was telling her that she could choose to let go, that she had done her part, that I could continue without her. I truly grieved at that lucid parting, but knew the time had come.
My mother wore two rings on her finger. One was the simple band she and my father bought in Belgium to indicate that she was married (they had not exchanged wedding rings at their marriage and, in Belgium, at that time, without a wedding ring and pregnant with my brother, people assumed she was not married which she did not like!). The other was my father’s ring which she wore after his death. At her death, I took both of those rings and somehow they exactly fit my finger. I now carry them both lightly, day in and day out, remembering the gifts they both passed on to me, and their love. Life continues and renews, comes and goes, an appropriate thought for Eastertide.