Keep It Simple

 Staring at the cursor on the upper left corner of the screen, blinking away, I wonder how many times I have thought about sitting down to write This Blog. 

My mother died. After eighty-seven years of living on her own terms, she decided that enough was enough and she left the earth shy one Barbara Caven. 

I feel it currently in waves. In bits and pieces that don't exactly fit together. There is nothing linear about grief. There are these great arching swoops of memory and emotion. Now my mom exists in all times in all places. 

My mom. Everyone's mom. That was the amazing thing about the woman who raised me. Not content to raise her three boys and a dachshund, she took on the neighborhood. She fed the kids we brought home. She pulled their loose teeth. She listened to their stories. She gave them a place to be for a while. 

As the years passed and we all grew up, they kept coming back. For a kind word or a cookie. To share their lives with the lady who had cared. 

I stayed in touch. I don't have any doubts about what I might have left unsaid. I do wish that we could have had one more game of gin rummy, as I believe she was ahead from our last marathon. I will miss so many things, like the way she could fill in the blanks for any question I might have about what was playing on Turner Classic Movies. I will miss our post-game breakdown after every Broncos game. I will miss matter-of-fact wisdom that only a mother could share. 

I will miss my mother. 

I can say that I am relieved that she didn't suffer. But I know that she did. She had an upper lip so stiff that her laundry list of ailments were pushed to the background. She was not one for scenes. She kept chugging along as she could. Until she stopped. It would be ridiculous not to call her passing a tragedy. The void that she leaves cannot be reckoned. All the lives she touched. All the moments she held and shared. Those who knew her best were the better for it, and those who only knew her briefly wished for a little bit more. 

In some ways, now there will be enough of my mom to go around. She is everywhere. All at once. I will spend the rest of my life trying to love her as much as I know she loved us all. Her friends, her family, her sons, her birds, her home. I am so very lucky to have been part of the light of her life for all those years. 

That light will never go out.