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.