Happy 89th Birthday Mama. This morning I looked out my bedroom window and saw this soft moon silhouetted in the blue sky over lone peak and I thought of you. Is there a moon where you are? Is the radiance from the Son so brilliant that a moon would be obsolete? While your feet touched our earth, you were a shining star to us seven kids and we miss you, dear Mama. Your light was dimmed and distorted by hardships and illness, but you always reflected an undeterred ray, a hope that someday every tear would be dried and earth’s sorrows would be insignificant, when you stood before the Source of that Light.

Recently I discovered an entry in an old journal, written 22 years ago, two weeks after your funeral. I realized anew, my heart’s deep mother wound, which oozes still to this day. I feel such guilt, speaking of my own pain, when so many carry much heavier burdens in their hearts. I think it is a safe assumption that we all are wounded in some way, and are searching for a healing balm of resolution.

Today, on your earthly birthday, my beautiful Mama, I honor your light with this moon over the mountains. I still long for the warmth of your arms around me, to feel your love and to know that you are proud of me. A permanent hole formed in my heart when you died.

January 9, 1997

We put her in the ground on a Sunday afternoon. The sky was gray; the wind was biting cold. As they threw the shovels full of dirt upon her box, I let my coat blow open to feel the cold around my arms. It was the chill embrace of death: I felt it through my chest, straight to my heart. She was my Mama.

Mamas are supposed to take care of their children. They make everything all better. They make you feel safe and secure. My Mama could never quite do those things. She was often tired and sick, even when I was growing inside of her. I knew she always loved me. But I was always afraid that I would lose her.

And then I lost my Daddy. I was only four years old, so I don’t remember him much: just that he was big and strong and loved to laugh. He gave me and my brother, Lowell, gum and pennies for taking off his work boots at night. When he drowned, they wanted me to kiss him in the wooden box, but he was all cold and felt hard and I didn’t want to touch him.

Thirty years later, I’m all grown up. I touched my Mama in the box. I stroked her hands and her face as she lay there in her white dress. I thought about the hard life she’d had and that now, all her pain was gone. And I thought about me, the little girl who kept losing pieces of her Mama: when we took her for heart surgeries and didn’t know if she’d come home, when she had a stroke and we kids became the parents.

She never really felt like my Mama after the stroke; she just wasn’t the same person. At fourteen, I still needed a mother. I really pushed her in therapy because I needed her back. I tried for so long to “fix” her, but she was permanently changed from the damage to her brain. I tried for years to accept her; I could if I pretended that she wasn’t my mother.

Maybe she was a sweet, kind lady with a limp, garbled speech, and inappropriate emotions. Maybe I was just her wonderful nurse, caring for her. I wasn’t embarrassed by her. I just needed the old Mama back to mother me. When she had another stroke a few years ago, and needed to be totally cared for, I often wondered what God’s purpose was for her here on earth. I know we don’t get answers to such questions, but I asked them anyway.

And now she’s gone. And I don’t have any parents. Does that make me an orphan, even if I’m an adult? When I look up through the branches of my family tree, all I see is blue sky. I hope someday the hole in my heart won’t be so large. I think a part of me went into the box with her that cold Sunday afternoon. After all, she was my Mama.