Remembering My Mother

My gentle friends remind me "Grief takes a long time and you will encounter pockets of it long after you think your grieving is over." There were many deaths this past year: my friend Jan Scarbrough, my mother, my little cat Katie, Larry, the nice manager at Lolita's who I considered my friend. My friends who have walked this path before tell me, "For the first year you will grieve at all the 'firsts': my first birthday without my mother, our first Christmas without her, New Year's Eve. My father told me last night, "We always kissed at midnight. This year she isn't here."

People don't generally like to read about grief, I think, so I will keep this short - but I also want to say that I am learning things from all these passings and so much loss in one year. I have been blessed up to this year by not having lost very many people I love to death, but a deep wondering has awakened inside me over the past few months about where that spark of life goes when it leaves its earthly body. Or does it simply go out... like a candle flame snuffed into darkness? Either way, the fact that we walk around in our bodies doing all these amazing things (seeing with our eyes; feeling with our hearts; hearing with our ears; connecting with our sensitive hands; thinking, planning, experiencing, forming ideas, judging, dreaming, imagining, creating with our minds, ... a million combinations of sensation and awareness every day which we so casually experience and forget... it all seems so amazingly wonderful at the moment and my heart fills with appreciation because I know, now, in a different way than I did before, that one day it will all be gone.