Grief

During the last year of my mother’s life, I made four trips to Texas thinking I was preparing myself for her departure and wanting to spend as much time as possible with her. Reflections on what my life might be like afterwards collided with a wall of incomprehension, a conscious awareness that I was unable to gain insight into my feelings or prepare a First Aid Kit for Feelings that would help me get through the aftermath of her passing.

The best I could do was to attempt clear communication about what our life together had meant to me and how her being in it made a difference for me. That was my resolve. But the wall of incomprehension remained unbreachable. Throughout her life we had difficulty communicating, and simple desire to do so as the end of her life approached was insufficient to clear the hurdle. My first thought as she stepped across the threshold of awareness was: “Oh! Just one more thing, Mom.”

Grief, to me, has come to mean simply the inability to converse. All conversations with the absent one become one-way communications with imaginary responses. Mostly I grieved for her through my dreams with a sense that we were having another visit, perhaps another chance to communicate that “last thing.” In the four years she has been gone, I have gradually come to know her better by revisiting memories through the prism of common experience that she negotiated before I passed that way. In that sense I feel she is still with me. That is a comfort.

Stay well; your company comforts me.

Copyright 2009
Lynn Chapman-Adler
www.lindalater.blogspot.com
Posted: September 4, 2009