To Share These Streets with Her Has Been a Blessing

Two years ago today, my mom died of breast cancer after an eight year struggle. She was a beautiful lady, inside & out-- a giver, empowerer, analyzer, counselor, sometimes a nag, loud laugher, organizer & often creative genius. She constantly assumed the position of coming alongside people to the point that I have a hard time thinking of stories specifically about her, despite missing her constant presence over my lifetime. A lot of my best character traits came from her (although I didn't get her amazing legs, a damn shame.)

Like one plant gives shade or nutrients to another, we belong to each other. Life is not an individual experience, it is a collaboration, whether we realize and choose to accept it or not. She contracted cancer of the breast, but that wasn’t what killed her. It was the intimacy between organs- tissue connection and shared body fluids. As each gives, takes, and communicates with the others, they pass on subtleties too minute for them to influence or defend against. It is the same with our lives.

Capitol Hill Rowhouses in the fall.

I find peace and purpose in small things my family and I have shared with my mother-- knowing it falls to us to carry her torch now. In 1976 she moved to DC from Oregon, a greenstick sweet little doe of just twenty three. My parents lived on Capitol Hill while my dad went to law school at Georgetown & she often told me how she used to love the neighborhood and watching the leaves change in the fall here. Over thirty years later, just weeks after her death, I had made the same move at the same stage in life and found myself with a weekly reason to walk through Capitol Hill for the first time in my life. It was not premeditated, although it was a kind coincidence. Below is my reflection on the experience of that sweet happenstance one evening after I made the connection, just as autumn was setting in.

I let my mind wander and we're both twenty five, with bright brown eyes and long auburn hair, wandering through the rowhouses on Capitol Hill in the fall, enjoying the neighborhood, wearing burnt orange-brown boots dad bought for her and her leather gloves. Both with peaceful, satisfied, subtle smirks on our faces with little noise but the leaves crunching beneath our feet and sporadic conversation.

We are full of life, healthy, at rest and going places. I shake myself back to the physical reality and it is just me. To share these streets with her has been a blessing.

On Death (briefly)

Death is always painful for the living. Even for those who believe deeply in a better life after death--the loss of a loved one produces (as it well should) a powerful reaction. It can be a beautiful thing. The experience of death WILL re-shape the lives of those who survive. "Normal" is different now. The question is how will we be re-shaped?

The grief of those who mourn is directly related to the relationship they had with the person who died. Initially, it's like being burned--the tissue is exposed and anything that touches it is either excruciating or doesn't register at all. To move on and form new bonds is more difficult to do--like skin that doesn't grow back the same over a wound.

In the best cases, families that experience loss are drawn closer together. One relationship is severed, but in speaking of the dead often, we honor the past relationship and simultaneously build new bonds with those still living. When my mom died, I worried that my family would fight more without her there to mediate. I am finding instead, a sweetness in our relationships that honors her memory. My father's sickness & death also uncovered more of a deep compassion in us for each other that may have been there in some form earlier, but is now shared and seen. In many ways it's what we needed.

Grief is often the process of forgetting and remembering over and over. It will never be normal for a loved one to be gone, no matter how many years are lived without them. I do not yet identify internally as a child whose parents are dead. It sounds strange to say, because I forget that it's true. In telling their stories to each other--we continue to learn about my parents and know them better.

The challenge in death is to go on living. To be affected, but not defined by loss. It is a beautiful thing that we cannot walk through this without being changed--we belong to each other and it's right to feel deep pain. Grief is never over--but to continue on and to live is glorious. Life is worthy of pain suffered and does not erase, but does surpass grief. In time.