Sitting Close to Mom, 11 May 2014

Apparently, 1:00 in the afternoon on Mothers' Day is rush hour at the cemetery.  In the past thirty minutes, five families—not counting me—have come to lay flowers and balloons at the gravestones of their loved ones, their mothers and grandmothers.  Oddly enough, disproportionate to the county demographic, four of the families have been Asian, and I realized today that up until this afternoon I've only heard one other Asian woman cry.  Sonya, my dear Korean friend from church who has cried with me as we've mourned our respective losses, also happens to be the one who loaned me the beach chair I've planted myself in next to my mom's grave marker.

Today, I'm spending Mothers' Day with my mom.  Okay, technically I'm spending Mothers' Day in a chair on a grassy knoll next to a piece of rock with her name on it, under which sits an unremarkable can of precious dust, but I feel closer to her here.  Her remains (how clinical that sounds!) are buried in a little cemetery not one mile from where I grew up;  a plot of grass surrounded by non-irrigated fields browned by the sun, shaded by a cluster of old pines and flanked by a range of brown and blue mountains in the near distance.  [Eew, gross!  Did you have to hack up a spit-wad, O giggling teen visitor?  I was just starting to feel poetic.]

Mom used to love wandering through cemeteries.  I think she liked the quiet—and a mother of six certainly would—and she was fascinated by the history behind old grave stones.  She liked to wander around and see what the earliest dates were.  Honestly, it seemed kinda weird to me, although the history part of it was cool.  We weren't a family with traditions of visiting family plots, though.  I think I've been to my paternal grandfather's site once, as a child, and I'm not even sure which cemetery it's in.  I've seen the site of my maternal great-grandparents a few times, but only while attending the burials of other ancient relatives.  So it definitely feels a little out of character to have driven two hours from my home just to sit in a beach chair next to a rock.

[The other visitors have all gone and a resident killdeer couple has made peace with my presence and stopped scolding me with their plaintive calls.  I see a squirrel sunning himself on the bordering chain-link fence; a blue scrub-jay hops around under a tree while a green hummingbird hovers in front of it.  I can tune out the occasional whoosh of passing cars on the country highway, and the gentle breeze breathes peace.]

But this rock has my mom's name carved into it: Constance.  A beautiful name, full of swirls and curves, with such a soothing meaning, “constant.”  One thing's for sure: Mom was constant.  When she committed to something, she saw it through—and saw it through excellently.

• She saw six children through homeschooling from Kindergarten through high school graduation, and she was able to watch the first four graduate with degrees from universities.

• She started dating my dad at 16, married him at 19, and nourished and cherished their beautiful marriage through thin and thick, sickness and health, until her passing out of the arms of her husband into the arms of her Savior, just eight days after her 33rd wedding anniversary.

• She and my dad bought five acres of empty, wild oat-strewn land three hours from their city home, not knowing when or if they would ever build.  The next year, they decided to go for it and put their house up for sale.  They had five little children (one a newborn) and my dad didn't have a job to relocate to, but no matter!  Mom and Dad felt God wanted them to move, so they did.  Mom watched God provide for them as they designed a new home, transitioned my dad into the—surprise!—new job he'd gotten, while she homeschooled three of the five kids and carried a sixth in her womb.  Over the next two decades, she spearheaded landscaping, gardening, sheep-raising, treehouse building, orchard planting, wallpapering, home library collecting, fruit canning (and even a foray into meat canning and food stockpiling before the threatening approach of Y2K), the occasional needlepoint, and so many other projects.

• She played organ, her instrument of choice, for countless church services, playing with tenderness and passion.  Receiving her Master's degree in music at the age of 45 (a year before I got my Bachelor's in music), she took great joy and care in choosing music and playing it with love and skill.  She had many disparaging things to say about electric organs, reed organs, and organs played all “mushy” with tremolo.  She liked crisp, clean, open, beautiful sound.  One of her greatest joys was trying out pipe organs in historical churches.

• While my youngest four siblings were still in high school, Mom and Dad bought a mountain lot and designed and built a beautiful rustic-looking home as a rental investment.  For months, Mom scoured city thrift stores and yard sales for furniture and decor to fill each of the mountain home's eight or so rooms.  Books, paintings on rough-hewn boards, distressed-wood chairs and dressers, quaint bed posts, fishing poles, even a little pump organ--every detail needed to outfit the rental home with care and style.  Oh, and did I mention that these were the first years she was undergoing intensive care for her newly-diagnosed polymyositis?  Talk about dedication.

Her canned peaches were always colorful and the right sweetness to tart ratio.  Her landscaping design was always a wonderful balance between the manicured and the barely-tamed.  Her interior decorating was always homey and welcoming.  Her music was always well thought-out.  Her children were well-educated and her husband well-loved and her whole life well-lived.  Yes, my mom was constant.

And I constantly miss her.

So being at this middle-of-nowhere cemetery surrounded by granite signs of people's losses, I sit, feeling close to Mom.  And isn't it the height of irony and beauty that the scolding killdeer has made her nest on a grave marker?  Level with the ground, in an unremarkable can empty of decoration, she sits on four speckled eggs, waiting for life to hatch out.  I’m sitting near a grave right now, too.  How long am I going to sit next to the dead, waiting for new life and joy to “hatch” in my life?  I don't know.

But I do know that today I needed to sit.  To warm myself with memories of Mom and care for my fragile heart by letting the calm of the countryside caress me.  I can be like the killdeer.  I can sit, and I can tend the nest of my heart, and I can wait for joy and breaths hungry for life to hatch.

It's coming.