Moving on with sadness and love
I’ve been living in a pandemic bubble for the past year and a half, a little solitary dream world of doing exactly what I wanted, keeping safe and isolated until the vaccine came along this Spring, and putting off literally everything. No more.
The past few days, for example. My sister and I have been extremely emotional as the long-awaited day arrived for going through Mom’s closet, cabinets and chests of drawers. Mom passed away in January 2020, and it was evident just a month later that all our lives were going to be upended with the Covid pandemic. All plans were put on hold, including the memorial service. My sister is here from Seattle. They were very close as only mothers and daughters can be. She’s spent hours going through Mom’s personal belongings, often in tears yesterday morning as she went through her clothes.
I put aside for myself a number of things that I knew Mom loved and some things that reminded me of her so poignantly during those last ten years I was taking care of her, things no one else would think held any significance other than that they belonged to her..
My sister found a lot of the birthday and Mother’s Day cards I had given her over the years. I remember how I’d go to the nearby Hallmark Card Shop and look over the cards a week or so before Mother’s Day, poring over perhaps a dozen or more cards, reading inscriptions/poems over and over again until I felt satisfied that I had found just the right one.
Mom loved gardens and gardening. My favorite card is on that subject. Back in 2008, there was this: “A mother’s love is a beautiful garden, nurtured with love and caring.” Inside the card, it read:
My mother kept a garden
A garden of the heart,
She planted all the good things
That gave my life its start
She turned me to the sunshine
And encouraged me to dream…
I am my mother’s garden
I am her legacy
And I hope today she feels the love
Reflected back from me.
The most difficult thing of all will be when I leave this beautiful house in our historic district for the last time. We will be selling it soon, and I will be moving to an apartment. Mom was so happy in this house where she remained until the end. It is almost unbearable to think we will have to sell it.
I gave her that card just two years before it became necessary for me to move in and live here to take care of her full time as her dementia got progressively worse, year after year.
We also found her 1941 high school yearbook. I had seen it once before decades ago when we lived in New Orleans. It was her senior year. For some reason, though, I didn’t notice or forgot that she was editor-in-chief of the yearbook. That really affected me deeply because the best experience I had in high school, 28 years later, was serving as a section editor on my own yearbook staff in 1969.
What a week it’s been. I’ve experienced a range of emotions, from pride and happiness at having had such a mother, to renewed feelings of loss, sadness and depression in the mornings when I wake up and realize how much has changed. It’s hard to acknowledge it’s finally time to move on, even as I’m so comfortable in *her* house, and that is what it will always be, not mine or my siblings,’ or the new owner, because her spirit will always reside here and in her beautiful garden.
Giving up the family home is the hardest thing. When we sold Mom’s house it was like the end of an era. She and Dad and some other relatives are buried in that small town, but none of us have any reason to go back there now. After generations spent there. It’s so sad.
Take lots and lots of pictures before you leave. The house, the gardens, the trees, the places where you played growing up. The rooms, the furniture, the bed you slept in, the kitchen where memories were made. You’ll pull them out in a few years and remember things.
@startingover_1 You know what it’s like. It’s really wrenching for me. But, yes, absolutely I will take lots of pictures. I have already started. 😌
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You write so eloquently about your pain and memories Oswego. We never had a family home that we lived in for many years so9 there was never that wrench for me. Not will there be a wrench when I finally have to leave this house — it’s just been a house and not anything compelling.
I’m glad your sister is there to share this leave-taking with you.
@ghostdancer Thank you! After 25 years this does feel like the family home, although it is not the home I grew up in. Still, there are endless memories of good times and bad associated with this house, and my mother made it a very special place in which to spend her last years.
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