Mom

So, my mom died this summer. Maybe if I write those words they will finally sink in. Just today I wanted to ask her a question and for a split second thought of sending her a message before remembering I can’t do that exactly. Yes, I know she is still with me, hopefully interceding for me as only a mother can. That is truly a gift, but it is not the same as having her here and all the faith and hope in the world doesn’t just make it better.

I’ve been here before in this familiar place of grieving, accepting, and changing. Losing my mom, so far, has not been quite like losing my children, although I know the twists and turns of grieving too well to know that could change. I will not make any sweeping blanket statements here. It could get worse. It could get better. It may do both. What I think right now is that there is something about the expected order of things that makes it a tiny bit easier to bear. Most of us grow up expecting that someday our parents will die. Or, maybe it’s because of a lifetime of growing independent and learning to say goodbye. First there was kindergarten when I went off to school, and later college, when I really went off to school, and then marriage and a family of my own; these events have all been preparing me. Each goodbye has been a necessary step in order to start something new. We just cannot stay the same. We grow up, we change, and we become more and more fully the person God created us to be. But growing pains hurt. Cancer hurts. My mom was just three weeks shy of her 68th birthday.In those moments when the loss is keen, it’s hard to find the joy in it. Human nature craves the comfortable sameness of the presence of the one we love, but death calls us to something different. Death forces our hand and calls us out of our comfort zone. It calls us out of our old selves and leads us to a new self, if we let it.

I have a choice in those moments. I have a decision to make and some work to do. I’ve written this before and I stand by it 100%. It takes determination and an act of my will to embrace the change that will come from the suffering. It takes an act of my will to acknowledge the pain of the moment or situation and then force that scene off of center stage. There are better scenes to play and I am the director calling forth new actors; the truth and reality that Heaven has grown by one and will one day be my own home. The truth is that God knows all and works all for my good if I turn to Him and love Him. I have to force myself to choose the desire for that Good of my soul over all else. The truth is that God alone is the source and summit of all happiness. The truth is that my mom wants nothing more than for me to seek and know the God she has stood before. She spent her life preparing me to go forth and she isn’t done simply because she is gone from my sight.

Yet it’s not supposed to be made all better simply because we have faith and hope in eternity. Losing your mother is a huge loss, an unparalleled loss, since there is simply no one else on earth that can be what she was. She gave me life and has been there for every minute of it since. Her absence now feels strange and unnatural and desperately wrong and yet this is the natural order of life. It is a wound that has to leave its mark in order to do a work in me. We don’t become new and emerge until we say a painful but necessary goodbye. I still have work to do and a purpose to fulfill. Lucky mom, she was done! She is living the reality I can only Hope in. She is preparing a place for me now just as she did 41 years ago. I know that saying goodbye this time is just one more step on my way to being ‘all grown up’. Goodbye, mom, until we meet again….

Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen

June 20, 2015  Denise M. Faisant Berger  7/12/47 – 6/23/15