Reflections on Simple Moments, My Mom, and the Love That Does Not Die

Yesterday when I first arrived to visit my mother she appeared totally checked out and unresponsive to the staff who were talking to her. As I get right down to her eye level and kiss her lips and smile and wrap my arms around my mother, it is like she wakes up and comes alive. Her eyes open and she smiles and we gaze at each other and her whole energy shifts. 

Then, out in the garden area, my mother and I spend much of our time simply sitting together and holding hands. And Mom sits quietly with this smile that speaks to how she is present and pleased and experiencing peace. 

My mom always breaks our silence to share something about her experience. Today: “It’s so pleasant to have you by my side.” It’s so peaceful.” When I ask how she’s doing today, Mom responds, “Right now? Wonderful because you’re here.” ... “It’s so wonderful having you here by my side.”

I flash back to the one therapist of mine who met my mom in 1985 when my mother traveled 2,500 miles from Michigan to Oregon - when I was in inpatient alcohol and drug treatment - to make sure everyone here (my family, my therapist, the people in the treatment center) all knew it wasn’t her who was “bad,” it was me. That therapist told me later that my mother was compelled to push away love and that there was nothing I could ever do to make her love me. I’d been told for decades by therapists that I would need to grieve my mother as a death. And, indeed, that is what I’d been doing for many years. 

Today I am reminded again and again that everything is impermanent. Some people never wake up and truly experience loving and being loved. But this is not the story for my mother and me. With powerful antipsychotic medications and antidepressants, with just enough forgetting and forgiveness, and - most of all - with the miracles and power of love, at age 87 my mother began to awaken and experience freedom from the tortured prison of her severe mental illness. After a lifetime of resistance and fear, she began to open her heart to love. Not a day passes that I don’t give deep thanks for this miracle that I’d thought impossible. 

Today all the narcissistic entitlement and image management and fear and rage and separation and self-hatred projected outward is gone. And my mama and I are left with these simple moments of smiles and hand holding and gazing and lovely breezes and peacefulness and reminders that, under it all, there is this love that does not die.

Blessed be... ❤ Molly