A Mother's Day remembrance

I had left the room for a few minutes when my mother died.

June 1985

She was terribly ill for 18 months, and we'd all rushed to her bedside many times over those tumultuous weeks. Finally, worn out from the months of battling illness, she told us that the time had come. "This is too hard," she said. "I want to go home." She was 58 years old.

At the end, my father kept a vigil at her bedside, supported my two sisters and me.

On Mama's last night, my sisters went away from the hospital for a much-needed break. My father never left the chair at the side of her bed. I asked if he wanted something to eat, then hurried to the hospital cafeteria to fetch some food that I could bring back on a tray.

When I got back to her room, my father's chair was empty. He had left her bedside. I could hear the shower running in the attached bathroom. And I knew.

One look at the bed confirmed my fears. My mother was gone. I'd left the room for 15 minutes, and in that time her eyes had fluttered open one last time, then closed for good.

After he finished his shower, my father came back into the room where I sat, horribly alone. He touched my mother one last time and said, "Well, we gave it a good fight, didn't we?"

That was all.

I'd read stories over the years of how families joined together to make a beautiful occasion of the passing of a soul from this life to the next. I guess I imagined that my sisters and I would be sitting at my mother's feet, collecting last bits of wisdom and sending my mom off with words of thanks and hymns of praise. Somehow I always thought that this would be a special, sacred time, when we would all feel the presence of the Lord and weep together.

As it turned out, my mom slipped away while I was out getting sandwiches. It was not what I had imagined.

My older boys with their grandmother, 1996

Most of all, in my imagination, the occasion of my mother's death was a time that was far, far in the future. It was long, long after my mother had helped me pick paint colors and choose wallpaper patterns and sew curtains and all those little things that we used to do together. It was a time after my children had grown up, long after they'd taken swimming lessons and built pinewood derby cars and sung in concerts and learned to drive and graduated and gotten married. It was after they'd proudly presented my mother with great-grandchildren to love and spoil. It was always later.

But as it turned out, my children were 2, 6, and 8 years old when my mother died.

It's been 15 years since I got to wish my mother a happy Mother's Day. Now Mother's Day reminds me that things don't always work out as we'd planned.

My mother wasn't perfect, but she was beautiful. She was kind. She did her best to love us and care for us. I wish I could have learned more from her. I wish I could have asked her more questions. I wish I could have struggled through the years of bringing up my own children with her to love and support me.

Most of all, I wish I could just tell her thank you again.