A letter is a conversation with a friend or loved one and it bridges the miles and should give the feeling that the person who wrote the letter is right there.

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When I started blogging eight years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. Most of my friends didn’t know what a blog was even after I explained it to them in great detail. It was such a strange, heavy word. Blog. It reminded me of  the sound hot fudge makes when you spoon too much of it into cold water to see if it is ready to set. I remember friends staring at me strangely when I would say the word. Even friends who could conceive of such a thing, were perplexed at why anyone would keep one. In the meantime, blogs were multiplying like bunnies on the Internet and I was very nearly late to the game.

My first blog was Bioluminescence and I blogged for three years as “Firefly”. At that time, it was very important for me to keep my anonymity because I had small children and the Internet was a new and frightening place for me. I blogged about some things that mattered and some things that mattered very little, if at all. I blogged about my family, homeschooling, and other daily matters at hand. I posted photographs of my girls at the pumpkin patch milking cows, playing pioneers in our backyard, and reading books while perched in their favorite maple tree.

And then, one day, my mother died.

My mother had struggled for years with some form of dementia that was completely alien to our family history. She started slipping away when I was still in my twenties. The first time I knew something was very wrong (and beyond any ability I had to rationalize it away) was when we were in Massachusetts for my grandmother’s funeral. It was in the month of January and it was beyond cold. I had forgotten how much it could snow in New England. The houses painted neatly white in the summer now looked gray and neglected. I borrowed my grandmother’s long silk underwear to wear beneath my dress at the funeral. I remember looking down into my grandmother’s grave and wondering how they were able to dig such a deep hole in the frozen ground. I felt a great swell of grief when I realized that we would be leaving my grandmother in that hard, crystallized earth wearing the same dress she wore to my wedding on a very hot August day in South Carolina. It was her best dress. It was only the second time she had worn it.

My grandmother was just shy of ninety-four when she passed.

We were at my grandmother’s house just after the funeral when it happened. My mother, who was sixty years of age at the time, leaned down over my small daughter, smiled broadly, and asked her if she remembered sleeping in her uncle’s bedroom when she was a baby. My daughter looked back at me puzzled. I looked at my mother, still bent over my daughter, still smiling. It seemed like an eternity passed. I looked pointedly at my younger brother who was the only one of my siblings able to make it to the funeral. My mother had just time-warped over twenty years into the past.

When at last my mother glanced up at me, the smile slowly slid from her face. For a split second I saw a look of confusion, but it was quickly replaced with softly flushing cheeks and a small fluttering laugh. I heard my voice float out across the room.

“Mom, that was me. I slept in Uncle Bob’s room when you…”

She stopped me in mid-sentence complaining of how tired she was. How she’d gotten little sleep the night before on the pull-out sofa. And, for all outward appearances, our world slipped back to normal for the rest of the afternoon.

My sister and I had been talking for some time about the small changes we had seen in our mother over the years since I left home for college. I had attributed much of my mother’s early symptoms to early menopause. She started writing notes to herself and leaving them in strategic places around the house when I was still in high school. That was easily dismissed, but the trail of breadcrumbs became more obvious as time went by. Obvious to me, it seemed. Not so obvious to my father. By the time she quit driving, my mother had become an expert in the art of covering things up. No one even blinked when she decided she wasn’t going to drive anymore.

While my sister and I had been tossing things back and forth for a while, things seemed undeniable once I told her about what happened at our grandmother’s funeral. Not long after that, my sister, who lived in the same town as my parents, approached my father and made an appointment for my mother with her doctor. My sister was horrified to find that my mother couldn’t answer some of the most basic questions the doctor asked. It was then that we began to mourn. A mourning that would slowly crescendo over the next six years.

When my mother passed away at the age of sixty-six, I was initially relieved. I thought that the end of the mourning had finally come. I was naïve. The pain at watching her slip away slowly in life was replaced by another pain that I was not prepared for. My mother had left us long before she actually passed, so I didn’t understand this new pain. I still don’t really understand it.

One of the things that has bothered me over the past five years is that there was so much about my mother that I never really knew. I knew my grandmother inside and out. She was an open book who shared the great expanse of her life and all its adventures, both good and bad, with me. We would spend our summer visits poring over old photo albums while my grandmother recounted a collection of memories that should have filled a book. A big book. It was a great gift she gave to me. And while I sometimes wish that my uncle would pass down some tangible things that belonged to my grandmother, I know that I have something better.

My mother’s life, though, is like a blank book to me. She only shared what she wanted to and even those things I was often unsure of.  The things I thought I knew about her, I often found to be tenuous pieces of truth spun together with something like the truth.

Recently, I have been thinking about these things. I don’t want to pass from this life without handing my daughters something like a book. I don’t want them to wonder who I was and feel that great aching emptiness I feel when I think of my mother. I want to give them the gift my grandmother gave to me. I know it is not going to be easy and I can’t even be sure that I will be allowed to finish it, but I feel compelled to try. So here I am today, pen and paper in hand so to speak, beginning to write letters to my girls. I hope they are reading.

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http://www.the-athenaeum.org/

Will, the girls and I are taking a little family vacation this week. I wish I could tell you about all the educational aspects of our little foray and include photos, but that will have to wait. We are first and foremost getting away to have some quiet time together as a family. Since the loss of my mother, I have been relentlessly pushing people away from me including my own husband and children. I haven’t really cried about things, but I wouldn’t even know what to cry about if I could.

My mother and I had a complicated relationship. I wish I could tell you what a wonderful mother she was because, in turns, she was. But then, it would feel like a half-lie. And a half-lie is almost always or usually very nearly a full lie. If I tell you of the other topsy-turvy, spinning turns of my life with my mother, I would feel like I was betraying the good in her. She was a woman living her life as best she could on this planet. How can I criticize that?

If I tell you how much I want my mommy right now, you would assume I meant my mother. I assumed I meant her. Now I am not so sure.

I feel so lost. I want someone to hold me, rock me back and forth and softly, through my great heaving sobs, tell me that everything is going to be okay. Someone who won’t care that I am getting her shirt all wet with my tears. And I want to stay there as long as I need to stay there. Not until she tires of it all and plops me back down on the hard wooden rocker all alone. I want to be able to cry myself to sleep and wake up still in my mother’s arms. But not really my mother.

My husband wants me to get on with my life. To buck up. To be the adult. I don’t want to be the adult right now. I want to have a great, screaming meltdown in the middle of the supermarket floor just as the cart is already half full of groceries and everyone is staring and muttering that someone really should do something about this child.

My children want me to help them with their math problems. To fix their dinner. To clean the tub. I want someone to do those things, too. Someone to make sure I have fresh sheets on my bed and a clean dress laid out for tomorrow. Someone who knows where my shoes are.

Where is she? Where is this person called Mother. Who is this person called Mother? Why is everyone looking at me?

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February 2, 1939 – January 29, 2007

I wanted to let everyone know that my mother passed from this world to be with her Father in heaven yesterday morning. I thank all of you who wrote to say you were praying for her and for those who didn’t write, but were praying anyway. Please pray for my family as we will be taking what looks to be a rather long drive in bad weather on Thursday. I am going to be taking a little break from blogging over the next week or two as the girls and I will be spending that time with my father. Please keep him in your prayers as he was my mother’s sole caretaker and his life completely revolved around tending to her needs. He is lost without her there to focus his attentions on. I will be back, dear friends. God bless you all.

A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.
John 16:16

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It is not an easy thing to lose your mother. Once, when I was three, I lost my mother in a grocery store. I remember looking at a row of canned food and then looking up for my mother and she was gone. She was there and then she was not. I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment because there are no words adequate for the feeling a three-year-old has at the loss of her mother. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to get any easier with age.

For the past year or so now, I have felt that three-year-old curled up inside of me crying inconsolably, “I want my mommy.” I do, too. I want my mommy. I want her so bad and I can’t find her anymore. And, this time, she’s not looking for me.

When I go to her house, I open her drawers and find things arranged just as she left them. Her neat, little address book tucked away in a drawer with her pens and pencils and envelopes. I read the entries in her address book written in the neatest handwriting you have ever seen. Some addresses or phone numbers carefully erased with new ones penciled in. I try to find the most recent changes. I realize what seems like yesterday was actually several years ago. My mother. Always so neat and organized. I feel like I am peering into a time capsule. Like I am being ricocheted back and forth in time. Just a few years in time, but seemingly a lifetime apart.

I run, crying out for my mother, but she is not there. She was just there a minute ago. I just looked away and she was gone. Somebody help me find my mother. I want my mother. I want her now. I run up and down the wide aisles and I can’t find her anywhere. She is not rearranging her pantry. She is not busy decorating a wedding cake. She is not sitting quietly on the couch tatting. She’s not sitting at the dining room table carefully writing a letter to an old friend. She’s not out in the yard talking across the fence to a neighbor. She’s not bringing the clothes in from out on the line or ironing shirts or watering her plants…

When I was five, I watched my mother leave me. I was the oldest of her four children and we all had pneumonia while my father was away on a business trip. When he came home, she told him that she couldn’t take it anymore and she was leaving. And she left. I watched her from the kitchen window as she walked down the side street and away from our house. Away from me. I don’t know where she went. I don’t remember when she returned.

I’m looking out that same window now. I know where my mother is going. I know she won’t be returning to me. I want to cry out and bang on the glass, but she is too far away now.

It is not an easy thing to lose your mother.

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