My Mom died on Mother's Day. A stroke had left her free of the cares and worries of her last two decades of decline. Gone were her worry lines and she looked 20-30 years younger, her natural beauty once more shining through as she glowed with happiness that the two people she loved most in all the world were with her in her hospital room, my Dad and me.
On the last day I was with her, my very proper, almost Victorian Mom gave me my what I took as my benediction. As I was leaving her room, she beamed with love at her black bearded son, all grown up now, and exclaimed, "Go, you Moon Man!"
Our psyches are a complicated morass . . . so complicated it is possible to hold the unbounded joy of a Mother's affirmation and the deep sadness of her physical parting side by side in our memories, down until the day our own hearts stop pumping the life giving blood that keeps our own neurons firing, and we ourselves begin our own uncharted journey into the mystic.
It is said that we come into the world alone and we go out the same way, but this is not quite true. We quite literally come from and are nurtured by our Mothers, born from the seed of and protected by our Fathers, and we go out borne on the memories of this long train of love.
We are not our bodies. We are every small thing we have ever done to make this world a marginally better place, and we live on in those memories.
Memories.
No one you ever loved is truly gone so long as you keep their memory alive in your heart.