A few moments after my mother died, I walked outside of the hospice where she had spent her final weeks. She’d been unconscious for days and we‘d had her removed from life support just a few hours earlier.
When the attendants zipped her body into the black body bag, they left the top open so we could whisper her goodbye one last time.
As I emerged into the fresh air, a strong breeze ruffled the trees overhead. I looked up at the sky. Maybe I got a glimpse of heaven.
My mother lived for 87 years. She passed away on what would have been her own mother’s birthday, October 9th. She had been born in a Scottish village just outside of Glasgow. Her family came to America when her father, a tool and dye man, answered the call from Henry Ford to work in Detroit for the princely sum of five dollars a day.
The breeze kept blowing, the leaves kept rustling and my mind kept racing, going back over what I could recall of my mother’s life. I was 55 at the time she died, so that meant she had been 32 when she had me, a year after my father got home from Europe after the end of World War II.
She’d graduated as the top student from her high school but didn’t go to college. She had married young, pregnant with my older sister, gotten quickly divorced, moved back in with her parents and gone to work for the Ford Motor Company in its office in downtown Detroit.
It was there, some years later, that she met my father, got remarried and had three more children.
As her only son, she doted on me. My sisters had every right to resent the favorable treatment I received, but they didn’t seem to.
My mother and I had been alone with my father when he died from a massive stroke just a few years earlier in Florida. For the three-and-a-half years after that, we became closer than we ever had been.
I’d extend my frequent business trips back east to add a stop and visit her. On these occasions, I’d usually take her out for dinner. She called them our “dates” and giggled at the concept.
But now she was gone and suddenly it felt chilly. It was autumn in Michigan.
Death is part of life, I reminded myself. It doesn’t do to dwell on it too much; the inevitability of death in inescapable — what matters more is how you live while you are here. A series of similar cliches cascaded through my mind as I retreated back into the warmth of the well-heated facility and the company of family.
But one more thought came: It is not so much how much you’re loved; it’s how much you love. I was thinking of my mother. I was missing her.
***
Recently, at a social gathering I met up with a former colleague whose son had died by suicide.
Following his son’s death, this man had written and published a loving tribute that described the young man as a sweet person struggling with life’s challenges. And that his son’s troubles were now over.
At the party I took him aside and told him how much his writing had moved me. I said that it was the most beautiful love letter I’d ever read.
His face melted into kindness. We embraced. He thanked me and told me, “Whenever I think of my son now, the only thing I remember is his love.”
No comments:
Post a Comment