Close your eyes and imagine mom saying, “Chicka-dee-dee-dee,” as she watches the little black capped bird hop around the skinny glass feeder. See her sip hot water from a speckled blue mug and woosh mail and magazines around the butcher-block table to find the place she last remembers reading, where a word waits for her to catch it.
Eat your blueberry pancakes, with homemade honey slathered over top and place the container of stickiness on the pile of letters.
Say, “mom, I don’t have time to eat,” even though you know you are wasting precious seconds. Watch her pin her eyes on you and repeat her mantra, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You are not allowed to leave until you have eaten everything on your plate.” She will turn back to World Magazine without blinking and you will never see her take a bite.
Arrive home from field hockey practice at five forty-six and find her talking on the phone to an adult sister, while NPR news chatters like another family member. See her fingers kneed dough and move it around in a restaurant sized mixing bowl. The paper selection in front of her shifts and now a book like The God of Small Things, Go Tell it on the Mountain or Lucy Shaw’s Poetry usurps their importance. She will ask you later if you have read one of these and you will have to say “no” over and over until you feel heavy with the burden of your disconnect. You will wish you had known the significance so you could talk about them. With her gone, wonder if reading them might give you language and word to hang on, feel close to. Imagine that she is her favorite character, Jane Eyre, and soak in her simple desire to be loved for her. Somehow dial her invisible phone and feel her voice wrap around you and rock you, because her own mother’s hardships made her to want to be available for her own children.
Say, “boy I am so thankful I had you as a mom.” Listen to her say, “oh honey,” in a faint breath. Feel your wet cheeks and hear her say, “what is it, honey?” Be the girl in the high school production of Our Town who watches her mom slip past, because she can no longer stay. Say, “good-bye” and then mouth the words “I am sorry.” Know that the two months of summer camp, then three in a college semester quickly slipped to six as you followed your spouse West all the way to the moment she forgot your name. Realize you have waited too long.
Try to live in your mom’s brown kitchen as your three year old comes in to say, “Did Grandma Klauder give me this bear?” Then as he looks at a sister’s family calendar picture he will say, “look mom, it’s grandma Klauder. She’s in this picture.” Then as the finale hear him describe a walk at the nursing home when he was two where he says, “Grandma Klauder fell, [pause] in the bushes.” Recall his twinkling eyes as he remembers how mom went barreling into the brush and sat down for a rest. Laugh the way you used to about his memory.
Tell him that she died and went to be with Jesus and say now she has her voice back. Now she can tell all her stories. Watch his eyes shift toward the ceiling. Remember the fall evening at ten when you became aware that mom might die someday. How you lay on your bed sobbing into a pink pillow. She will come into your red wallpapered room and stroke your head and say, “Oh honey, I am not going to die for a long time.” Grab that hand and move it along your head the way you place your hand over your son’s, when he tells you he does not want to go to meet Jesus and he does not want you to either. Repeat back mom’s words to his sudden clouded eyes, “I am not going to die for a long time.” Hope for his sake, that you are telling the truth.
Know the power of your mom’s face. How she would tear up at anything inhuman in the world or your day. How she longed to be with you in your moments. She made those blueberry pancakes every morning, left the dishes to someone else and worked diligently to create warmth through her knitting needles. She loved a good walk, a good paddle in the canoe, a glide on the back of the tandem bicycle and dropped anything to take the van across the country to collect you from some adventure in growing older.
Her life hangs still in this moment when you whisper a love song back to her, decide what bits you will carry in the locket around your neck and what to say in your farewell for the longest amount of time you have ever been away from her.
“God, thank you for collecting her in your arms and stroking her head better than we ever could.”
