My mother died last Friday in the early evening, at home, with family, in God's pervasive peace. The prayer service for her was tonight, and the funeral Mass is tomorrow.
The past two and a half years of her suffering, in which the family shared, more and more intensely as her body succumbed, are now as gone-by as an arrow from the bow. And the
passion-stations of bodily deterioration were all at once vanquished like smoke when she went to her Maker, vanquished by the simple, smiling tranquility in her face. She has gone to the place prepared for her. She no longer has cancer.
She decided long ago that she would offer up everything that happened - I know this. I know simply by contemplating everything in retrospect; a task which has only just begun.
I do not wish right now to contend with facts, biographical information, and bringing it together in a way that would bring out a little of who my mother was, and who she was to me. Maybe I could, later down the road. But now, perhaps I could tell about one night and leave it there.
This was in fact just a few weeks ago, after my mother had her three seizures and was unconscious most of the time. There were rare windows of time in which she was awake, and actually quite lucid, though incapable of any speech beyond short, barely audible fragments. One night my youngest sister was at her side, holding her hand, and my sister was crying. No new thing, that. At that point crying was pretty much business as usual all around.
But when I came near she said that mom was awake, and she asked mom if she wanted to see me, and mom responded, "Sure" - a response which my sister found kind of humorous. It was when I came around to the other side of the headboard of the bed, so that I could see my mother's face and hold her hand, that I understood fully what was making my sister cry.
When someone smiles at you, intently, in the prime of health, and full of life, it is naturally a pleasing thing to receive. It can make one's day or week, and even alter the course of one's life.
But when someone smiles at you - a mother smiling at her child with a mother's love -
through the crucible of disease and imminent death, a smile not in the least bit fazed by the fact of bodily suffering, it absolutely pierces you through like a bullet. And any hesitations, any fears, doubts, concerns about the past, though these instances were long healed over - like the few times in which I made my mother cry (oh, how things come around) - if they weren't fully gone before, they're now gone in an instant. They no longer matter compared to love's assurance, being reciprocated, and you're in tears, and everything is pure compassion. Not that it wasn't ever before...but love does not stop.
In the economy of love, assurance is piled on assurance. What can I say better than that my mom was a mother? Oh, she was many other things besides - but now, that will do.
May she rest confidently in His peace and light.
