Mother's Day mourning

“Buttercup,” my mother said, waving the soft petals beneath my chin.

It’s one of my earliest memories, standing in our grassy bank, my mother crouched before me on a bright warm day. The word became the flower plus all it encompassed, smallness and sun overhead and a color that can only be described as buttercup.

Mom named for me all that absorbed her—birds, flowers and all manner of plants, history, and every aspect to things she treasured. I learned from her what a “primitive” antique is, the difference between crewelwork and embroidery, that the grain of fabric mattered, and how to tell pewter from tin, silver, or silver plate. I absorbed even when I didn’t understand, and for years she loved to tell how I once asked her, “How old were you when the Silver War started?”

From my dad I learned a wider world, how to swim and hit a tennis ball, how to saddle a horse and skin for cooking the doves we hunted. My mother mapped out a world of things close at hand. She filled up my Eden, you could say, while my father charted the rivers flowing out of it.

This naming of the warp and woof of life is something we tend to overlook, especially if it gets in the blood early on. As Adam and Eve learned in the garden, it gave them an ability to navigate and to have a say in how things went.

Naming a wider world would become a way to cope with the raging killer within. My mom helped me see beauty this way on the hardest days.

When my mother came to the other end of life, the brutal side, she struggled with names. For weeks after we learned she had cancer one year ago, she avoided the word in conversation. “This disease,” she’d begin, vague, keeping its meaning at bay.

On the late spring day we visited the oncologist, saw the scans and learned the cancer had spread, well, everywhere, she didn’t want to talk about it. We each had tears and tended them quietly in the car. But as I drove, she began to comment out the window: “Look at the roses,” then called my attention to creeping phlox spilling over a rock wall. Naming a wider world would become a way to cope with the raging killer within. My mom helped me see beauty this way on the hardest days.

A short prognosis forced difficult conversations. “It’s not a question of having faith,” she told my brother and me in early summer, “it’s that I’m just not ready to die.” Bit by bit we struggled to name her looming death and see it also “swallowed up in life,” latching onto words as rafts when the day-to-day reality of her awful sickness, and caring for her in our home, overwhelmed us.

I had so many fears, I listed them one hot day: fear of Mom losing her mind as cancer advanced to her brain; fear of the day she would no longer walk, no longer clean or feed herself; fear of how long the hard days might last, and how short they might be; and fear of failing at everything else in my life as I faced a road with Mom doomed to end in failure, too.

Some days felt full of wilderness. Wandering Israelites faced God’s wrath in the desert not so much over breaking His law but forgetting His goodness. Like them, in our home we needed to see “how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son” (Deuteronomy 1:31).

My mom grasped this Father-like carrying. While I listed out fears, she’d begin the mornings naming all she was thankful for. She had a smile ready for visitors, even as she worsened, and winter days forced a slowing and grim patience on us.

One snowy day in January I sat at her bedside, holding her hand, quiet. Her eyesight had dimmed, her breathing had grown shallow, and her words slurred. A flock of birds I’d never seen fluttered onto a birdbath piled high with snow just beyond her window. She noticed.

“Look at the towhees,” she said. Then she saw a cardinal on a high branch and chickadees, naming each and smiling as she did. Her death came two days later, her face toward the window from the same bed, death swallowed up in life and the hope of the world to come.

Email mbelz@wng.org