Navigating though the grief

I’m reluctantly admitting that grief is a process and I must let it run its course.  But God never gives you anything unless he also equips you with the tools to handle it.  Nothing ever comes to pass in our lives except through God’s permission.  He allowed Job to be tested and in the end when God was done speaking to Job, he had these words to say, 

“I admit I once lived by rumors of you;
    now I have it all firsthand—from my own eyes and ears!
I’m sorry—forgive me. I’ll never do that again, I promise!
    I’ll never again live on crusts of hearsay, crumbs of rumor.”

Job 42:5-6 (The Message)

Today I found my mother’s cell phone.  I have to call Sprint and disconnect it.  There are pictures in that little phone of her and her grandsons.  Under contacts, I found phone numbers for her friends and family.  I called and talked to two of her friends.  One knew she had died and the other didn’t.  These were her friends and it was just nice talking to them about her.  I got to see a different side of this woman that I called mother.  They all spoke of her and how much they will miss those small little things, like the cards she sent every Easter and Christmas.  Or the phone calls from her.  

Somehow, it just made me miss her ever more.  So I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.  My son brought me pictures of my mom.  He always brings me her pictures whenever I fall apart.  I got a phone call from my mom’s youngest sister.  I talked a little about her last days.  I’m not sure what closure I could actually offer for the kind of regret she will carry with her.  But for my mom’s sake, I bit back the reminder that she had missed her chance.  She told me that in the absence of my mother, I still had my aunts.  I wanted to tell her that wasn’t true because despite the words they spoke, they never once attempted to connect with my mother.  For her sake, I just let it go.

I harvested some pumpkin blossoms this morning.  I wanted to fry them up the way my mother used to do.  It was an absolute disaster.  It struck me that I will never again taste any of my favorite foods that she used to make.  It was a debilitating realization.  I didn’t have the heart to even consider cooking the meat I had started to defrost.  

After much crying I just decided to take a simple course of action.  I started to cook.  Not food my mother used to make, but food that I make for my family.  The baby came and sat at the table, rummaging through my spice bottles.  I mixed spices and let him smell the mixture.  He wanted to smell it again.  My oldest ran downstairs after his bath, demanding chicken.  I turned on the oven light and showed him the chicken.  It was going to be another half hour.  I began to cook up the spices for the curried pork I was about to make, my version anyway.  My oldest asks if that’s the chicken he smelled because it smelled so good.  Later my other half asked me what I made because the house smelled so good.   

Her kitchen is a bit of a mess and in need of cleaning.  It has produced smells that are distinctly mine.  At her kitchen table, food was served to my family and they enjoyed every bite.  It wasn’t anything like the food she makes.  It’s a start, trying to find my way back from this labyrinth of grief I’ve been walking for a week.  I can’t bring her back and I would never want to.  I’m glad she’s gone because to watch her suffer would have been the worst kind of torture.  I still can’t get over the image of her before her death.  But I’m learning to breathe.  In and out.  That’s how you’re supposed to do it.  

I paused in my writing to go lie with my two boys for a few moments.  My oldest had quite a lot to say.  I had forgotten what it’s like to just simply talk to him sometimes about something or even nothing.  When my grandmother died after suffering more than a decade from Alzheimer’s, my mother said that God had given her a grandson before separating her from her mother.  As the daughter in me grieves for my mother, my sons pull me out of the daughter until the love I have for them drowns out the grief the daughter feels.  God gave me two sons before taking my mother from me.  I don’t think I would have been able to survive this without them.  

At last, I see a small glimmer of hope at the end of this tunnel darkened with grief.  There is a giggle and a laugh that penetrates this fog surrounding me.  Two little faces peer back at me.  I’ve missed them.  It’s time for their Mommy to go back to them.  My mother’s words to me, spoken over five years ago, standing at my uncle’s grave, I never thought that she would be the one to throw me the life line to pull me back from the brink of despair.  That’s what sets a mother apart from the daughter.  The daughter knows only grief.  The mother has the strength to look beyond her grief and see only love.  Love is sometimes more than enough.

Swimming through a sea of grief

Literally a week ago from this time, I rushed over to my mom’s house so I could stay with her while my father went to the Friday night service at our church.  I knew she was gravely ill and that the end would be coming soon.  I knew that I would be moving into her house that weekend.  I sat on the sofa beside her bed after my brother and sister-in-law left and my dad went to bed.  I sat here and wrote last Friday, same as today.  Except now I no longer have a mother, just memories of her.  

There really is a grief that knows no name and can’t be described.  It is a grief that is shared by every daughter who has ever lost mother.  Like motherhood that connects women in a secret circle of sisterhood, so does this grief from the loss of a mother.  I’m not sure what to write or how to move forward.  I appear to be in a state of limbo.

My father and brother have gone to fly my mother’s body home.  I am here with my other half and children, living in her house, surrounded by her things.  Today I gave my son his first big boy towel from one of hers.  I gave my baby her special towel exclusively for his use.  I am slowly incorporating my life into hers.  Last time I was here, I was the daughter, ready to leave the nest finally in search of greener pastures so to speak.  I left home and made a nest of my own.

Not only do I feel the absence of my mother but I feel as if I’ve lost my home and everything that defined me.  I feel as if I’ve been caught up in a tornado and like Dorothy, displaced to a place that is unfamiliar and strange.  I can’t seem to get my bearings.  

I opened her armoire today and to my surprise, I could still smell her.  I told my son who stuck his face into the clothes and inhaled deeply.  For a moment, we just took in the lingering fragrance of her.  Earlier today, I had put a small dish over a cup to cover it.  My son flipped it over and said very matter-of-factly that this is how Dida did it.  Like I should know better.  So many little things.  The baby looks for her.  Last night he went through the entire house looking for her and hid in the corner when he couldn’t find her.  

At her funeral, my oldest wanted to see her old body.  He was curious.  He said she was in heaven and didn’t need the old body with the cancer anymore.  We all placed a rose in the coffin with her.  They will have dried up by the time she is actually buried.  Even the baby placed a rose in there with her.  He looked happy to see her body but a little puzzled why she was lying there with her eyes closed.  When we got home, he kept calling for her.  In the end, he kept asking for his Dadu. 

I thought I knew heartbreak.  I didn’t know anything until now.  

My mornings are full of short burst of energy.  Then I lose steam.  No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to move past this grief.  My other half says that I need to stop fighting the grief because ultimately I am fighting myself.  I don’t understand that.  I don’t think I’m fighting the grief, I am just tired of it.  I want to find that ever elusive life line and pull myself forward.  My life isn’t over.  My sons still have their mother.  I need to find the strength to move forward.  I just haven’t the foggiest idea how.  

I am grateful for all those who came by for show of support for us.  For those who have brought food, I am most thankful because I haven’t found the energy to cook.  I tried earlier today.  The only reason my sons had food today was because of the leftovers.  I am thankful to my aunt and uncle because through this, without them, I’m not sure I we would have gotten through.  Somehow, their loving support lessened the blow of the loss of my mom.  Just not completely.  

This has put a lot of things in perspective.  I think I have less patience than I did for the things in life which matter next to nothing.  I have let go of things which are seemingly superficial, like my fear of failure.  My mother believed I had changed.  She felt hope for my future.  I am choosing to embrace her belief and hope.  

I’m not sure how to get up and get going again.  So I’m going to keep writing until maybe somehow, the words pull me out of this grief.  I hope. 

Eulogy delivered at my mother's going home service

The first night I spent with my mother at the hospital over five weeks ago she said to me that when she was pregnant with me, she prayed for a daughter.  She said growing up, she never had the chance to play with dolls.  So I was her doll, she said.  I understood in that moment why she dubbed my first apartment the doll’s house.  

We spent a lot of time talking when she had the strength or was in the mood. It was the only time she couldn’t do anything but lie there and just hang out with me and I was the only one who was insane enough to drop all my responsibilities and just sit with her for hours.  It was the first time in my life I ever had frank intimate conversations with my mom.  I opened up my heart and told her things that I never imagined saying to her.  I felt regret at first for not having had this connection with my mother sooner.

When she first came to this country she left behind her home, family, and church.  She followed my dad and adapted to a whole new lifestyle.  My mother was a lady through and through and they just don’t make them like that anymore.  She believed in proper behavior and etiquette.  She used to say that you’re a woman, no one should know you were ever there.  Meaning, don’t leave behind a mess.  She used to tell me to cover up too.  Then she’d buy me clothes that didn’t really cover up things the way she thought they ought to.  I never understood that.  As you can see, save for my accessories, I’m still wearing her clothes.  Yes, I’m 36 and my mother still dressed me.  

She was the first of our family who came to ICC nearly 17 years ago.  Before then, she could be found sitting with her bible reading and praying every day. She was the one who brought us home.  Both my brother and I got married in this church.  My sons’ were dedicated in this church.  This was her home as it was ours.  This was our family and she brought us here.

The last two and a half months were the most spiritually intense moments of my life.  The last time I attended Sunday service, not counting the day after her death was her first Sunday home, June 15^th, the day after my brother’s birthday.  I remember coming here and sitting in the back with my family.  I looked up and the space next to my dad was empty.  I had an intense urge to see my mother so I left my kids with their father and went to see her.  I sat beside her and we prayed.  From that moment on, every Sunday was more or less spent with her.  

After she came home from the hospital, my brother wanted her to go to church but I could tell she was too weak to leave the house.  That Sunday, we had Holy Communion at home because she couldn’t go to church for communion.  The next Sunday, again I stayed with her and it was the Sunday her son went on vacation.  The Sunday after that, I was back again and this time she kept asking me when my brother was coming back.  She asked me to bring her grandsons, she wanted to see them.  I did.  My brother came home and saw her.  She didn’t make it to the next Sunday.  

The time I spent in her presence was so peaceful and it filled me with such hope that I couldn’t understand it.  That last Sunday, as I drove home, tears streaming down my face, I knew that I had to let her go.  What I didn’t understand is, how was it possible that I could have such sense of hope and peace when the word God spoke into my heart was that I needed to let her go.  

Once before, God gave me a word that she needed to seek treatment and he would take care of the rest.  I could be angry or bitter but later I understood that it was never for the cancer.  It was for the pneumonia.  If she hadn’t gotten treatment for that, we never would have had those moments in the hospital.  She said that she had been worried about me but she had seen that I had changed.  

I did change.  She changed my life in a way that I had never imagined.  God opened the doorway to heaven for her to pass into eternity.  She stayed in that opened doorway and let me rest there with her, basked in his presence.  That Saturday after she went home, I’m not sure which was worse, losing her or being shut out of that powerful godly presence that seemed to hover around her.  

My mother was a woman of faith.  Every breath she took, every word she uttered, every step, every moment of her life can be measured by her faith.  The Saturday before she died, as I was driving home, barely able to see the road for my tears, Chris Tomlin’s “Whom Shall I Fear? (God of Angel Armies)” came on the radio.  The next day when I arrived to see her she was struggling, anxious from fighting for breath. I turned on the radio for her.  The same song came on and I saw her, silently raising her hand and then to the best of her ability, she quietly sang along with it.  In that moment, I clearly saw this woman who brought me into this world and was about to leave me here.  This faith is my legacy, I could either accept and embrace it and let her go or spent the rest of my life feeling lost in a sea of grief.  

If you don’t mind, I’ve tasted grief and it is bitter.  I will take the hope she left me.  Because one day I will see her, and we will rejoice together in the arms of Jesus.  I am my mother’s daughter.  However, I am not as good at signing as she was, so I would like to ask my dear friend Nicole to help me leave you with this song that will always have such a special meaning for me.

Whom Shall I Fear (God of Angel Armies)