Winter fades, signs of new life budding everywhere.
The smells are palpable, teasing the tongue, promising the palate that something beneath the surface is bursting forth. I can feel the Good News germinating.
A warm embrace of the spring breeze lifts the corners of my forlorn lips, shifting them to smiles and breath and relief. Shoulders relax.
My eyes open.
My heart comes alive.
Brown turns to green.
Stillness to movement.
Cold turns warm.
Dying turns to living.
Tiny white flowers appear on brittle branches, waking up from winter’s harsh winds.
In the distance, chirps and tweets and chatters grace the fields and swamps, as small critters begin their assent from slumber to bustle, from southern places to nests in northern trees.
Spring is here.
I open my hands and wait expectantly.
Hope peeks over the horizon.
As you arrive, and promise new life and I muster up strength to accept you, I hold my mother’s frail frame, realizing there’s a change coming.
The natural world is going to run its course in the trees and flowers and winds and waters, and in her too.
Her mind releases its need to articulate thoughts.
Her lips move carefully, speaking only what’s necessary.
Her words are choice and few.
Her eyes distance.
Her grip weakens.
She smiles assuringly still, ever and always being the mother she’s been - trying to comfort and provide and protect, but she’s saying good bye.
In the way she can.
I know it now.
I’m finally willing to surrender to the inevitable truth, I’ve been holding tightly for a long time.
And I carry her to the room she loves, like I’ve always done.
There, sunlight is generous and space provides tranquility.
The Silver Maple awakens, preparing for the dance. Buds are breaking open.
Everywhere.
All around me.
I tuck her bony arms inside the chair rails, adjusting her thinning hair, and smiling her into a thinning veil of comfort, facing the fact that this daily charade I’ve come to love is going to end.
And we’re going to be separated.
And she is going to leave me.
As she should.
I wrestle with God a bit.
Bargaining with Him for one more day, one more kiss, one more gentle wink from her quiet eyes, but I begin to accept that there’s going to be a falling, a descent, a bitter taste.
She’s going to die.
I knew it all along, but now I see it clearly making its entrance, uninvited though it may be.
There’s a circle to this life and this moment brings me all the way around it with her.
As I douce my hands with lavender oil, fingering it over the skin, I transfer it to her restless legs hoping that my combination of tender and firm massaging will offer up some sort of reprieve to her weakening.
That the life I have in my hard working hands will stimulate whatever functioning cells she has left, prompting them to fire and do their job, even as they tire as well.
Somewhere in the mixture of this calling to care for her, I waffle between wanting to extend our routines, and wanting them to end.
I can’t possibly do this forever, but maybe I can.
I love this.
I hate this.
Holding both extremes in my heart, trusting God will reveal the sense in it, and direct me.
She can’t walk anymore.
Her appetite suppresses.
Her constant giving spirit, and the generosity for which she’s become known, detach.
And it strikes me, I’m only holding the shell of who she was.
I’m doing this rubbing, and tucking in at night, and offering of myself - for me.
She doesn’t need this anymore.
I do.
I think she knows that, so she gives herself yet again to appease my obsession.
She allows the prayers and early morning worries because she knows I need it.
And not really for any other reason.
In a wide sense, she's already free.
She’s just waiting patiently, allowing me a few more glimpses, an added touch here and there, patiently waiting for me to catch up to what she’s long been assured of.
She’s moving somewhere.
Boldly.
Confidently.
Her control is relinquished.
She knows there’s a Resurrection coming, she’s just standing in the wings, cued and ready,
awaiting her turn.
And you, Spring... you are speaking the promise just outside the window where we daily look.
You were once who she is now, a life at its end.
What was failing in your browning grass, and crinkling leaves, aimlessly drifting beneath the winter’s snow, is now a full emergent display of hope. You came back around.
Your dormancy became progress.
Your cruel violence became twinkling inspiration.
Your dying became living.
Your brittle branches, iced over and suffocating - became flowers.
Pink.
And green.
And white.
And now I see.
None of your whimsical colors come without having first been grey.
Life only comes when death comes first.
You are the hope Mama has been so desperately aching for me to know.
I say to her one more time, “I’m going to miss you Mommy.”
With no words, she offers a labored smile, comforting with a similar lament, as we surrender together,
though she knows the secret.
She’s trusting I know it too.
And in our silence, the reckoning.
The goodbye nears.
Resurrection is close.
God, way back when this started, this beginning to the end, you made me a clear promise.
It washes over me now, as I sift through the confusing and clashing emotions.
You promised you’d be near, you’d walk me through, you’d hold me close.
You said you’d speak what I needed and provide what protected - at opportune times and in mysterious ways.
All I was to do was trust it.
Trust you.
You showed me in countless measure that you were as near as my breath, as her breath... that you were in the waiting, the dying.
You told me clearly that there was a purpose and that you would accomplish it.
That my serving would make sense, that my pain would turn to joy, that my lamenting would turn to dancing.
You revealed in the days and hours that you were taking us all the way around the circle, from death to life.
And you did.
And, as I knew it, holding fear and faith in the palms of my weary hands, she breathed one last time.
I watched the rise of her chest… expand with a peaceful relinquishing sigh.
Almost a satisfying, desirous sigh…
And she gave up her spirit.
This exhale would be her final one.
And I got to be there.
Right there on the threshold of heaven.
And time stopped.
You revealed Yourself, yet again.
Now what?
Everything is utterly different.
Meaningless by all accounts.
I’m still.
I don’t know what to do.
Her assent begins.
New life taking wings.
She’s rising to that Resurrection you promised her.
Promised me.
I can almost see it as I hold her lifeless body once last time.
I’m tempted to lie across her just to make sure it’s true.
And though still I can only see dimly, she finally sees face-to-face.
That body I served, those hands I caressed, and those feet I kept hoping would walk again have arrived safely home.
Each having done their job.
Her work is done.
I didn’t get to have what I wanted, that her life would last longer and longer, that we could keep going.
We were fine, I thought.
She was healthy.
We were just getting started it seems.
I didn’t need to hear those flippant comments from bystanders - that “she’d lived a long life” and “that it’s just fine for it to be over now”.
In the final analysis, when her arms went utterly limp, and her hands no longer gripped, I would have gone another hundred years with her and it wouldn’t have been long enough.
But, it’s not about that sometimes.
That we want to keep going, to continue toiling.
Seasons of rest must come.
They’re actually earned.
Mama had paid up.
Surrender was required.
And so she did.
Now, I have to.
The circle of life with all its rhythms is supposed to go this exact way.
I know.
I know.
Lives end.
That’s the deal.
Lord God, You showed me in the buds of spring, in the transformation of the cold ground into a warm earth - ripe for provision, in the colorful tulips lining the daybreak this morning of her homegoing, that you would continue the cycle.
She’s done her part.
And my role in that is done.
And it’s okay.
And now, it’s mine to continue.
In this cycle where there is birth, life, death, and Resurrection, you are there orchestrating the next move, helping me tell my story, guiding me further into Yours.
In my heartbreak and uncertainty of the future I cannot see, You will hold me steadfast.
You will keep moving me forward, moving us all forward.
Never making me face what is too lofty, but always calling and equipping for what is mine to do and face and feel and conquer.
For my good. For Your glory.
She’s home.
And good.
And happy.
And You will still be with me.
You’ll walk me through.
You’ll fill in, lift up, wrap around, and show Yourself constant.
You keep Your promises.
I don’t need to see any further ahead then the footsteps in front of me.
You’re there.
Guiding.
My hand in Yours.