Remembering My Mom On What Would Have Been Her 100th Birthday

 

In Remembrance of My Mother

On June 5th I went to River View Cemetery in Portland. This would have been my mom's 100th birthday. I brought flowers, complex feelings of grief and gratitude, and the deepest love and compassion for my mother and her struggles and strengths that spanned a lifetime.

I reflected on the truth of the first mother I'd known for most of our lives. This was the mother who had carried layers of unaddressed generational and cultural trauma. This trauma manifested in alcoholism, depression and anxiety, an inability to love or experience compassion, and all of the symptoms of malignant narcissism. There was a deeply painful impact of my mother's untreated and unhealed trauma on us all through my childhood and beyond ― all of which played a significant role in my twin brother's suicide in 1978, my father's early death at 60 two years earlier, and the symptoms of addictions and PTSD and complex trauma that I experienced.

As I stood in the cemetery at her gravesite, my heart was also broken open once again as I held with conscious awareness the profound miracle of what I call my mother's "partial awakening" that began in 2013 when Mom was 87 years old. This is when my mother was moved to live here in the Pacific Northwest near her family, was treated with antipsychotic and other medications, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and had just enough memory loss to not remember things that she had done that would have been unbearable, and that she began to experience an immersion in the love of family ― most of all, my love. This is when my second mom was born. A mother who was capable of receiving and giving love.

This miracle was never supposed to be possible. Moving from "I hate you!" to gazing into my eyes and calling me her "precious darling" was never, ever something I thought could happen. It simply cannot be overstated what an incredible experience of profound grace that it was to bare witness to just enough of an opening into my mother's heart for there to be a channel to love. For the first time. Tears....

Gratefully, I had first engaged in years of addressing, healing, unburdening, and transforming so many layers of my own trauma. If I hadn't, I would have gone down with all of the bitterness and blame, fears and shame, grief and rage, addictions and delusions of separation and unworthiness and unlovability that had for so very long been unknowingly and blindly passed down generation after generation. And I would not have been capable of loving my mom, this mother who had once been so brutal. And a second mother would never have been born. Without doing this deep work of healing my own trauma, I would have remained cut off from the wisdom of my heart.

Today I recognize that underneath all of the flailing about, all of the delusions and harm and violence that humans can perpetrate on ourselves and others is this indwelling Self. I have been moved to share this eloquent quote from Mark Nepo many times who describes our Self in this way — “Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.”

For 87 years my mother's connection with her Self was severed, something that happened to her as a tiny vulnerable child. Today I understand that this is what she had to do to survive. And the cost of this estrangement from the wholeness and beauty of who she truly is was profound. 

Then, beginning in 1983 my mom and I teamed up in a conspiracy grounded in Love, the most powerful medicine of all. And the impossible became possible. 

This is rare for someone as narcissistic and as devastatingly wounded and traumatized as my mother had been. But together we did this. It wasn't just my love for her that made all the difference. It was also the courage, the wisdom, the strength and power of love that had always been inside of my mother, seeded in her heart and soul... but buried through so much of her life. But it was always there — this core that cannot be wounded, this Center of our Love.

Our last seven years together is something I will always treasure with all of my heart and soul. And this is what I remember and cherish most of all. 

Miracles are possible. And we humans can find our way back into the wholeness of who we truly are. This cannot be done in isolation. We need the support and courage to open our hurting hearts enough to experience the power and the Grace of Love.

Bless us all...

🙏💜

Molly