so long

It feels an eternity since I wrote here last. So much life lived between now and the last time I worked in this space. The unfortunate truth that I am back here to process a loss, a loss I'm not sure how to articulate. Today is the day after Mother's Day, the first Mother's Day I celebrated as a mother of 5 and here I sit, delayed in the airport after missing a flight that will lead me to bury my mother. The sudden loss of her is both startling and somewhat expected and yet the irony of this, of my traveling to lay her rest with my sweet daughter, 5th in line, just as I was to my mother, born to me the same age my mother was when I completed her child bearing years. So full circle and continuous is life.

In six weeks time my siblings and I were to gather together for the first time, all in one place, to give our mother a chance to enjoy her children and grand children what was expected to perhaps be the last and only time. The heartache of this, that instead she passed alone in her decades old trailer, no one there to notify 911, no one close as she breathed her last breath. I can't stand it. I can't fathom this, why the trajectory of life lead her this way. I hesitate to even say God, though I know He allowed this. I am angry with Him over it, but also oddly placid. Things will happen the way they will after all. It benefits us not to dwell on the unanswerable why. The practicality of my nature that I inherited from my mother.

I don't want to do this. I don't want to go back to the town where I spent my entire childhood, where all my memories of her are so fresh. I don't want to step into that trailer where I grew up, the one I cleaned because she didn't, the one I was so embarrassed of in my youth, the one that made all of my belongings wreak of second hand smoke. I don't want to remember the man who lived in the trailer down the street and how she never knew. But I'm writing all this here because I have to. I have to process the loss of her, of a person who loved me so deeply but hardly told me. Who boasted of my successes in life to people she'd never met, but from whom I only received criticism.

I love her, she sacrificed for me, she worked hard so I could have the very opportunities that brought me to the college where I met my husband, where God met me, where my life unfolded into this beautiful masterpiece that it now is. I love her because she is my mom, but I still carry hurt and resentment and questions and I know that only the healing presence of the Father will walk me through this. I am an orphan now. No father. No mother. But I don't walk alone. I have a Father who adopted me long ago, who celebrates me and allows me to rest. It is my joy and challenge now to rest in Him.