A Mother’s Journal

Here it is Thanksgiving Day, and here I sit mourning the loss of my grandmother, who died this morning, on Thanksgiving morning. 

She was born in a different time – 1917.  She lived through things that are history to me and my children.  She was beautiful.  So beautiful.  The men who knew her when she was young said she was ”pretty as a peach.”  She was a faithful wife and mother to five children, losing one child — my mother’s twin – at birth.  Two of her children — her only sons — preceded her in death.  She suffered losses that I cannot imagine, and yet she kept going and living and being my grandmother.

When my own mother called me to tell me my grandmother had died, she cried like I have never heard her cry.  Her crying made me cry.  Her pitiful sounds over the phone were the evidence that she had lost something that was part of the essence of her very being.  It made me realize again how much we owe to our own mothers. 

Our mothers make us what we are — their tending to us, their loving us, their nurturing, their scolding, their teaching, their approval — and their actions shape us, just as surely as a potter molds clay.

If one is blessed to have a good and sweet and kind mother, as my mother was blessed, and as I am blessed, then the loss is great when mother passes to another realm and a great gap is made between that cannot be crossed. 

Sophocles said, “Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.”  Well, we ”anchors” stay pretty busy being attached to our mothers, no matter how old we get!  We may not need them every single minute or be dependent on them for care anymore, but I certainly know who I call when I need a shoulder to cry on, and sometimes all it takes is my mother’s sweet voice to start the tears falling.

Mary Lamb said, “Thou straggler into loving arms, young climber up of knees, when I forget thy thousand ways, then life and all shall cease.”  Mothers do love their children just like that until they draw their last breath, and so a great love that my mother had always known took its last breath today.  That was her crying.

That’s her.  My grandmother, in her youth, beautiful, with all of her life before her.  I am going to miss her.  My mother is going to miss her even more.

Who ran to help me when I fell,
and would some pretty story tell,
or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother.

Ann Taylor (1783-1866) and Jane Taylor (1783-1824), English writers.

Lynn