Here, in Drayton Harbor, the water changes each winter month. I stand and watch the evolution through a double sliding-glass door and windows. There are two panes, one on each side of the opening to the deck. The glass accentuates my view, as if it were parentheses at the opposite ends of human depth. I live in an over-the-garage studio and am the caretaker of a bigger property. Honestly, I am simply a watchdog at the end of a street that has no turn around space. Almost daily, the operator of an automobile or truck ignores the sign that is posted 100 yards in advance, and I watch out the window as they wrestle behind their steering wheel. A sharp turn to the right in reverse, followed with a deep forward left, repeating the moves again and again as they navigate around all the obstacles in their path. When they finally clear the last mark, I can almost hear them sigh with relief.
The maneuvering is comedic, especially because the drivers don't look up. They never see me. The watchman that stands above and whispers, Keep going pal. Keep turning the wheel. You're not even close to that tree. I know you can't see well enough in the space you are in but you've cleared it. You can make it home.
I wonder, observing the waves from a windstorm crossing the bay, if that's how God feels watching us strain to clear a curve, praying not to wreck our lives, and holding our breaths as we plead not to get a scratch. Does our creator stand at a glass door, looking at waves pound away sand, while whispering words to bring us home? Are angels close by when we drive our lives into the pavement, scrambling to get out of the way before the vehicle ignites and explodes?
It is a comforting idea, I think, as I look beyond the man-made wall between myself and the saltwater in front of me. As the days grow brief in winter, with only eight hours of daylight in the Pacific Northwest, I ache for comfort. I search the waters for warmth. I scan the skies for a reminder of sunshine-filled days, when families of sea birds teemed with song. But, I am met with silence.
I struggle to name this feeling that I have carried in my heart for so long.
I wake up on these steel-gray mornings and it hits me with a ferociousness that almost takes my breath. What is this? Am I hungry - still tired - worried - need more sleep? What is the gnawing ache in my gut?
It's loneliness. And the stillness rings deep.
Over the holidays, I began to experience thoughts that had not formed in my mind since last March. The ones that spilled over into April. Then began to recede in the weeks of May. Subsided like lulls in the water, lapping only occasionally and out of reach. Several times throughout the December days, I found myself thinking ...
I should call mama and tell her _______________________.
It's time to call mom so she'll know about ____________.
I can't wait to get home so I can pick up the phone and tell mom that __________________________________________.
I'm lonely for my mother.
For a decade and a half, practically without fail, we talked on the phone every night just before bed. In those beginning years, we carried about a 20-30 minute conversation. During the last ten years, they expanded to an hour. Then, between my visit last summer and flying home again in February to set up hospice care, our talks grew longer and deep. We were surprised to realize that we had been on the phone for an hour and a half, two hours, or sometimes even three. We found more things to discuss. Additional concepts to ponder. A surplus of stories to exchange. Memories which challenged our individual versions of family history. Jokes that took hours to tell with a punchline that made no sense. Dialogue that spiraled us into extended moments of laughter. And then, as she began to forget what we shared the night before, or enthusiastically told the same story the next evening, I realized that a little less of her remained.
I'm lonely for my mother.
How long can this possibly last? Even as I ponder that question, I know the answer is one simple word. Forever.
There are hundreds of books written about losing a parent. It does not surprise me that the majority of them are focused on mothers: the one who physically gives us life, the parent whose flesh tears to greet us, and whose cells are altered by our very blood as she feeds us through her own.
In Hope Edelman's book, Motherless Daughters, she acknowledges that there is no end to missing your mother. Instead, she discusses her own research findings about different levels of motherless grief:
Adjustment & Acceptance: The First Five Years Pain Turns to Longing: Five to Ten Years On the Outside Looking In: Ten to Twenty Years Experience Turns to Insight: Twenty to Thirty Years Lives Shaped by Loss: More than Thirty Years
I understand, of course, that these periods fluctuate and/or are valid according to the relationship one has with their mother. Had I lost mine earlier, say in my 30's, I know that I would more than likely have had a very different response. I cannot say that definitively - only in hindsight. I have been consciously "working" on our bond from my earliest memory of her. I am beyond grateful to be able to say that our love for each other knew no bounds, especially during our first eleven years, as well as in the eleven preceeding her death. I believe the repetition of those numbers is no accident.
Ongoing mourning is certainly not a phenomenal discovery. Psychologists have agreed on this for ages. But our Western culture not only doesn't recognize it, the concept is touted as "unhealthy". After all, we get THREE DAYS off work to mourn, right? My union faculty contract generously extends that to FIVE DAYS if traveling out of state.
The problem lies in the fact that grief is not a linear process. This model fails those who have lost a loved one. For it is not a simple matter of accepting that someone or some thing has been permanently removed from your life, it is a question of the time required to rebuild your heart. It lies around the fact that an entirely new relationship must form with what you have lost. You do not suddenly go from being someone's daughter one day, to an orphan in mid-life the next, without needing a long period to form and adjust to a completely new identity.
I have begun to understand that grief, in its initial stages, is all about missing who and/or what you love. Past a certain point, grief is missing who you used to be with them. Without that family member, friend, partner or lover, your whole life is suddenly void. There is a space that opens up in the world, and it requires a lot of time to discover how to color it in. Those left after the death of a loved one, or those who ache for some thing they have lost, find themselves suddenly unfamiliar. They must redefine, examine their values and possibilities, to create an identity that no longer includes the presence of what they lost. It is the same process for other types of grief: loss of career, home, pet, safe place within/without, belief system, finances, or health. You begin to grasp the foreign concept that you are no longer the same person.
Other cultures, in comparison to the West, have a different understanding of what it means to mourn. Those in the Hindu faith wait thirteen days before conducting a ceremony to honor the dead. Muslims have up to a forty day mourning period, while Buddhists in China recognize 100 days of grief. Even languages differentiate their understanding of loss; for instance, in Portuguese there is no word grief. They use suffering to describe such pain.
The wearing of black clothing by widows for a year conforms to societal expectations in some cultures, yet also may be an outward expression of personal grieving. Others require wearing a black band around the upper arm. Such a visual ritual relieves the burden of explanation. It creates a space of acknowledgement. One can easily recognize the sign of another who is in pain.
How different it might be if we could put a cast around our broken heart. If it were the norm to pin a small note onto our heaving chest that reads, Please be patient with me ... My mother died. Yet, if we would just stop long enough to really look at each other, even perfect strangers have the capacity to recognize grief.
I learned this last August.
I rented a small pickup for a couple of weeks. Just prior to returning it, I suffered my sixth loss in under eighteen weeks. The two hours it took me to drive to the rental agency were filled with tears of deep sorrow. My life had changed without warning yet again. But this time, the heartbreak pierced a part of me that no one else has ever touched. And I was unable to stop the convulsions that came for 120 miles. When I stopped for gas, I washed my face in a dirty bathroom sink and tried to feign the look of an average tourist. I drove to the parking garage, shut off the engine, and grabbed my belongings from the back seat. A company employee came out from a small booth and checked in the truck. I spotted the opening to the airport terminal when a woman walked past. She looked to be in her late 50's and smiled as she clutched a clipboard tightly to her chest. I returned the favor and felt my face stretch thin with pain.
Another couple of feet towards the terminal entrance, and I heard her kind voice.
Ma'am - are you alright?
A few months had passed since the death of my last parent. But what the stranger recognized in me was a fresh wound. She couldn't have fathomed all that I had lost. She couldn't have imagined how many times my life had violently altered in such a short space. But, for some reason that I still cannot name, when I opened my mouth to respond to her question, I heard myself quietly say, My mom just died.
Although the compassionate woman was still facing halfway in the opposite direction, she quickly readjusted her step. Without asking, she pulled me into her arms. The sobbing started again and I stood there, deep in the dark levels of an impersonal parking garage, limp in a stranger's arms. She held me until the moan from my chest abated and then whispered in my ear: Your mother never left you, sweetheart. She is always by your side. I promise this pain will ease one day. I will be praying for you.
She turned and walked towards the next customer without knowing she had just saved a life. Maybe she sensed that I was about to break, but how could anyone have known without really seeing me? Our culture is so isolated and the Western way of life has spread across the globe. More young people say they are depressed, lonely, and suicidal than ever before. We have moved from living in community with one another to the pain of living separate lives.
I'm lonely for my mother.
While I wait to find the "new me" that I must become, without her, I look for solace in the winter waters that ebb and flow beyond my door. When the moon rises early in the afternoon, clouds infused with gray waves inflate over the horizon, and I stand behind a windowpane, waiting for night to quickly fill the sky. In these short hours of winter, I search for a lifeline of sustenance. The only place I know where to look for comfort lies in the world beyond my cage of glass.
I find it in the saffron light of the January moon, as it magnifies itself in luminous waters. A huge disc of cold riding among tatters of solar wind. I glance upward, toes firmly planted in carpet threads, and my pulse quickens. For an hour, I stand before it - this colossal body of sun-reflected light that boasts solidified lava, oblique basins dug out by the shock of meteorites, and precipitous rock carved from past seas. It pulls me. Just like this aquatic channel near my home bottlenecks the tide, I am lulled into a far away place. There is a satisfaction in winter.
Landscapes might appear frozen and bleak, hardship assured in outdoor climate, but there is beauty in the cold: A broadleaf home for sharp-quilled hedgehogs, wood mice, and dark-eyed Juncos. The 100-miles-per-hour dive of a bald eagle, snatching a silver cold-water fish. Trumpeter swans and Canada geese roosting along the Skagit River. Stones piled thick with protection for slow worms, salamanders and Pacific tree frogs. Black Brant geese and Great Blue herons in a giant mud flat at low tide, scrounging for food. Snow-sprinkled volcanoes, icy mountain trails and evergreen forests dripping with crisp rain.
There is beauty in the cold.
In winter and in life, as we tend the fire indoors, silence speaks and we stoke our burning heart. We wait. Knowing that the seed of a new life lies just under the frost.
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