The little band of brightness that we call our life is poised between the darkness of two unknowns.
— John O’Donahue, Anam Cara
Tending to Endings (twenty-nine)
This week I am sharing a short passage from the manuscript I wrote following my mom’s death. This section comes from the final chapter of the book and covers the time early last summer when I was spending my days hiking and grieving and writing and making apricot jam.
Maybe it is because I’m back making apricot jam that I returned to this section, but when I did, I was reminded of how much my mother’s example helps me still, particularly through trying times.
Sometime soon I plan to collect stories from readers about people who help them through hard times. Please feel free to send me yours. Who serves as your teachers even after they have gone? And thank you to my friend Patty for getting my started by sending me a story of her uncle, which I will include in that installment!
Next week I will be taking a break from digital sites including my own, so there will not be a post of Tending to Endings on the 24th. I will be back with an essay for Friday, July 31.
Excerpted from Band of Brightness, “Home”
I carry my mother with me. I always have. Sometimes I have attempted to extricate myself from her out of fear I would never hear my own voice or I wouldn’t be able to distinguish mine from hers. Strong mothers are a gift—they show us we can be strong. But sometimes they also make it hard to know ourselves.
All of us raised by mothers carry at least some of their secrets. We are watching our mothers before they are even aware that we are separate from them.
My mom always loved and cared for me, but during some of my youngest years, I thought she did not like me as much as I wanted her to like me. Today I see that time in such different light. I believe what I sensed was her fear of the soft places in herself that she learned to make sturdy through intellect and values and humor and distance. Places that my young, sensitive self was trying to pry open.
My mother was a survivor of her own childhood. And I was a daughter who arrived with no knowledge of her past and with the belief that anything I witnessed had something to do with me.
It took me well into my thirties to recognize that I had an exceptionally good childhood. It took me until her death to recognize how consistent and compassionate and rare her form of strength was. She wanted her life to be an example. And it was.
In the late eighties Mom went through this time where she joined an organization called Beyond War and strengthened her commitment to nonviolent action. She got involved in many projects and she hung a photo of the earth taken from space in our living room. Into almost every conversation she would eventually inject the statement, “We are one,” as though it was the obvious conclusion to whatever we had been saying. To her the words were profound, but I was a literature major at the time, and to me it sounded like a trite cliché with awkward grammar.
Thirty years later, I realize that even though she stopped saying it with such frequency, Mom lived—we are one—like a practice. She lived it in the quiet way she connected to people she met on the bus or in a restaurant. In the way she fed the birds outside our kitchen window and then sprinkled seed on the ground for the squirrels. In the way she would bring neighbors to our patio and children to her garden even after her children had grown. She lived it in the way she would not criticize someone who disagreed with her. She would speak her mind, but she would not try to take someone else down. Friends who disagreed knew where she stood, and they loved her.
Not that everyone loved my mom. Mom was a letter-to-the-editor writer and one time she wrote a letter to the local paper making a case for peaceful negotiation rather than military response to some international crisis that was escalating. It was in the early days of online comments, before the concept of trolls and before I understood how mean comments would eventually get. Someone wrote a response to my mom’s letter calling her a stupid old lady who believes fairy dust was going to save us.
I was hurt and worried for my mom. I was angry someone would say something so disrespectful. I called my mom hoping she didn’t even see the comment. But she just laughed and said, “That doesn’t hurt me, Laura. I think it’s funny that someone would think something like that. They clearly don’t know me.”
My mom was strong.
When I meditate or hike in the foothills or stand on my yoga mat, I sense a connection to people and animals and rivers and sky. I sense that oneness with the world.
But, my mom went further than that. She treated people on a daily basis as though that connection was true. She knew that what hurts one, hurts all. What nurtures one, nurtures all. She spent her time on earth living the nurture part of that equation, the best she knew how.
I think back to that planet earth photo in my childhood home, now, during a time when our global situation is bringing home my mom’s mantra to us all. Maybe fast enough, maybe not, but it is becoming obvious, our connectedness. We can argue if we want.
Still, we are one.
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings, and I will look forward to posting again on July 31. If you are new here or interested in a rerun, Room For Grief seems relevant though it was written in March when we first went into quarantine.
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Much love,
Laura
