For my mom~
As a teenager you and I were like oil and water, I didn't really like you and you didn't really understand me.
When I bolted ... by getting into an old Saab with two men you had never met and we drove away... you believed you would never see me again. Perhaps I didn't even know if this was true or not at that time. I was heading for Colorado with a man and a dream. The mountains still call me.
As I grew I learned how to set my boundaries with you, to my surprise, this had you respect me even more. You taught me how to be strong, how to never let a man control me, to always have my own money and my own life. I've been lucky to find men who have loved me and appreciate this independent nature that you instilled in me.
I always loved you and came to really like you. Your sense of humor was quick, dry and hysterical. Your ability to listen and engage with others had many coming to visit you for hours when you no longer could leave your house. People loved you and enjoyed being in your presence. You even voted for a democratic president after 90 some years of only voting republican. Barack Obama made you proud. You would love the fact that Kamala Harris now commands the VP position. You were always a woman of power yourself.
You were born in the wrong era, one where men controlled the world and their wives and when women had only 4 choices of a career; teacher, nurse, secretary or mom. At 28 years old you came late to your last career as mom. Mom to five children and the wife to the minister of a small town. Talk about a fishbowl! You shouldered it well and an entire town came to love an entire family with your help.
So in November of the year 2019 you became ill. Not horribly ill, nothing that some medicine and a lot of Dr. visits might not have been able to help you through. But at 97 years old you saw that your independence and ability to still live alone might never return to you. So you decided it was time to just leave this plane and go be with all the family and friends who had journeyed on without you. And you asked me to be there to assist you. Perhaps it was because you had witnessed how I stood by my husband who spent 18 months dying from a brain tumor. Perhaps you saw that I was capable of doing this and would not try to convince you to stay. Your youngest and your middle daughters sat with you, laughed with you, helped you begin the month long process of dying ... with honor and with dignity. There would never be any other way for you.
Today, on Mother's day I find myself wishing I could call you or bring you the Irish soda bread you loved so much (it was your recipe mom!). And to sit in your living room and watch the flock of turkeys parade past your windows as you tell me what great mothers those "old girls are".
I miss you mom.
But I am of you and I carry you in my being.
Always.
Mom with Donna Gray.
