Mother’s day has always been kind of a strange holiday for me. Flowers, candy, a nice card, etc,etc, and then it changed. My mother died on Mother’s Day in 1979. I hadn’t thought of her for a while and then this week brought a lot back. I have a friend whose mother has been on life support in the hospital for over a month and that is probably the trigger for thinking of my Mom. She was born in 1919. It amazes me to think that she would have been 100 this year. She was the youngest of an Irish immigrant family. She went thru the depression and WWII. She married my Dad before he went overseas and waited and worried the whole time he was gone. She became a widow at 47 and only lived until 59.
When I think back she really went thru a lot. She was left with three children. I was mostly gone from the time I was 18, but she still had two young girls to raise. My sisters were 14 and 16. She had a difficult year and never really got over my Dad’s death. She then got a job and worked almost up until she got sick. She laughed a lot, loved gossip, and drank too much. We all loved her and it’s a shame she didn’t get to see all of her grandchildren.
I think most of us deny death until we have to face it. It always happens to someone else, or someone else’s family until it happens to us. The fact that there is a beginning with a tiny, beautiful baby is wonderful. The fact that there is an end is difficult to accept. When someone you love dies, it really does feel like the end of the world. You don’t think you will ever get over it, but then you do. Unfortunately some people never do. However most us go thru periods of intense pain and sorrow and gradually life goes on.
I hadn’t really thought of my mother, or my father, for a long time. We used to go fairly regularly to the cemetery where they are buried, but I haven’t been there in probably at least 20 years. When my sister died eight years ago I would go weekly to her grave, even bringing flowers to place there. After a while I even stopped going there and since we have moved it is a much greater distance.
I still think of my mother and my grandmother going weekly to the cemetery. Even years after the death of my father and grandfather, they would still want to go. It is strange how the dead reappear. A word, a song, a picture and it all comes back.
I heard someone say that cemeteries are for the dead; we need to focus on the living. Yet cemeteries are for memories. They are also reminders of our own mortality.
I am thinking more lately about the reality of death. What do I leave behind? I can look around and see possessions that I don’t want to get rid of. Furniture, pictures and books (lots and lots of books) that I know my sons will not want. Will they just try and sell them or donate them, of just throw everything out?
I have pictures of my mother and father and pictures of my own childhood. I have some strange things from my father, but really not that much. Maybe that is why I don’t think of them much.
Funerals used to include wakes, ceremonies, and burials. My grandfather was waked for three days, my father for two. There would be a ceremony at the grave and the family would be offered condolences. Now this has evolved to a ceremony at a cemetery chapel and the body is buried later. There is now often a cremation instead of a burial. A ritual of scattering the ashes often replaces the burial. Stories of ashes being scattered in ball parks, beaches or favorite parks are fairly common. There are also stories of people keeping the ashes at home. One of my old patients kept her husbands ashes under the bed for years. She had difficulty explaining this to her young son, especially as he entered adolescence. There are other families who keep cremains in a place of prominence in the home. Maybe that would be a way to keep the memory of a beloved family member more present. Right now I don’t know what is right. Every family has to decide that.
I just know that sometime this summer I am going to the cemetery and revisit some memories while I still can