On Being a Motherless Child

I thought if I titled this something that sounded really academic and smart then it wouldn't hurt.
I was wrong.
I want to start by saying that I am not a motherless child.
I am someone whose mother died much too soon.
She died of a disease that sapped her strength slowly over five years.
She chose when to die after this disease mandated she would die. This June will be the second anniversary of my mother's death. She called me the first week of June, 2004, and told me she couldn't fight anymore, it was too hard and she wanted to go. She told me to get ready and that she loved me and my husband and her granddaughter. She told me it was ok and to call her if I wanted to talk. Except, I couldn't call her. I had to pull away because even though I had talked to her for almost everyday of the last three years, I couldn't talk anymore. One week later she entered the hospital and less than a week after that she passed away in the early morning with my brother holding her hand. A day before she died I was in her room, they had just moved her closer to the nurses station so one of the nurses could always be with her and I started crying. These nurses had been taking care of her for the past five years, not all the time but with growing frequency year after year. One of her nurses came up to me and started hugging me, a nurse I had nicknamed The Battleaxe, and she just held me and she got weepy too. She told me she would miss my mom too and she was happy to have known my mom.
My mother first decided it was time to go, then entered the hospital when she was in pain. Then, in the hospital, she became anxious and talked about so many things she had to reconcile in her own mind. She worried about the relationship between my husband and my brother, my husband and myself, and then her relationship with her sister and her relationship with her first husband and after awhile many people I didn't know. She was working through issues and it didn't really make sense but she was doing it and it made sense to her. It turns out she had a stroke and soon her left side of her body didn't work anymore. My brilliant mother, who had not 1 but 2 degrees from Harvard, no longer made sense. And then she stopped being anxious and stopped being in pain but started to fade. We were with her all the time and started to tell the family that it was time to come to Boston. Some people came to the hospital and we had to warn them that she didn't make sense anymore. That was what was difficult for everyone, to see a woman who did the Sunday Times in pen no longer make sense and some forgot that she wasn't hurting, which was a good thing. All they just saw was that she had just kind of checked out. They knew that they no longer connected with her. They left a little confused. Then she died.
She had a beautiful memorial service that she planned herself, because that was my mom's style and she had five years to do it. She picked the music and she even picked the poem I read (which was perfect, by Sara Teasdale).
I do not believe in an afterlife and my mom was a bit vague about her beliefs but some interesting things have happened since she passed:
1. The morning of her memorial I smelled roses in a room with no windows and I suddenly felt very calm. Roses were her favorite smell.
2. The fall after she died the Red Sox won the world series for the first time in forever (do I need to mention she was a Red Sox fan?)
3. One year later the entire school commitee of a town in PA, which had been advocating teaching creationism in science class, was ousted. My mom felt the only place creationism should be taught was in a humanities course. She had been on the school commitee of the town I grew up in. She would have really cared about this issue.

I think I may miss her more now than in the few months after she died. I miss her insights and I miss her wit and I miss her intelligence. I miss the fact the she loved me no matter what and told me she was proud of me no matter what I was doing, whether I was in college or raft guiding or trying to earn a living making stained glass or selling out to corporate america. She loved me fiercely and I loved her the same. Daily, I try to remember what she taught me and I try to emulate her best traits, because that is how I immortalize her. My mother was a force, she was smart and strong and beautiful and as we aged we became closer and closer. I named my only child after her because I could not think of a better way to to tell her how much I loved her.
I am not a motherless child, I am a mother who lost her mother.

A Prayer

Until I lose my soul and lie
Blind to the beauty of the earth,
Deaf though shouting wind goes by,
Dumb in a storm of mirth;
Until my heart is quenched at length
And I have left the land of men,
Oh, let me love with all my strength
Careless if I am loved again.

Sara Teasdale

Elizabeth Sams Hawes, 1935 - 2004
I love you , Mom.