April Again

It is April again.

One year ago, in a time that felt endless and yet passed so quickly, I was an observer to my mother’s last few weeks of life. I felt like a useless, hopeless, helpless wraith standing in the shadows powerless to do anything while she moved steadily down a road it was her time to travel. I was scribbling poems last April, writing about doctor visits, get well flowers and signs from God, but even the poems that weren’t directly about her wore a dark undercoat of my fear.

One day a care package arrived on my doorstep. I found it there on the front porch on one of the worst days of my life, the day I brought my mother home from the hospital to die. There was a glass jar filled with tulips, a bag of chocolates, a box of tea and a notebook. On the first page was a note from my dear writing friends inviting me to write about my feelings.

So, I did.

I wrote about the last hours of Mom’s life, about planning the funeral, about the ceremony. I wrote about the trip to the cemetery in between thunderstorms where I felt a small amount of peace for the first time in weeks as we laid Mom to rest next to Dad in a plot they picked out themselves because it was next to her parents and under a tree Dad particularly liked.

I wrote about my sister-in-laws, both of whom acted poorly – one snubbed me and one ignored me – and about the troublesome brother who took his pain out on me. I wrote about all the problems and agony sorting through the house when I felt I was emotionally and physically getting worn to the bone.

I wrote about my anger. Anger at my Mom for dying and leaving all this on my shoulders, anger at my brothers for getting off Scott-free doing none of the work and feeling none of the pain. And angry at myself for feeling so fragile and vulnerable and, yes, angry at these people I loved.

As I read through a lot of my writing from last year, I see that it’s all colored by my grief, even when I thought I was writing about something completely different. Several times I wrote about clearing my head, about putting aside the sadness, but it wasn’t really happening. Some incident would come up and I would feel like I was back to square one. It’s only now, when it’s April again and the daffodils are starting to pop, that I feel a bit better.

Mom’s birthday was in April. That date is still the code to get into her house; a sad reminder that this year she would have turned 80 and I was planning to give her a big party with all the family invited. Several years ago I started a tradition of giving Mom flowers on my birthday, May 4, as a thank you. Last year she died on May 1 and the flowers I gave her on my birthday were to decorate her casket.
This year I’ll wait a few more weeks until the weather is warm enough and then I’ll start a different tradition I will carry on for the rest of my life. I will decorate her grave with flowers and send up a prayer of thanks for the 57 years we had together.

And I’ll also say a prayer of gratitude for my writing friends – Ali, Sue, and Judy – who have been so patient with me this year. All of them have lost their own mothers, making us kindred spirits in a couple of ways – we are all writers and now every one of us is a motherless child navigating this world. But, we know how to take our feelings to the page and emerge transformed and ready to face our journeys like the Monarchs in our gardens last summer.