It happened today as I passed a full-length mirror while shopping in the mall. Rather than my usual brief glance to check my hair and makeup, I was brought up short. It suddenly seemed as if I was looking at my mother - her face, her hair color, her body shape and her kind of shoulder bag. For one brief moment, I thought about calling to tell her about it. Then my mind cleared and I remembered that heaven is farther away than the best fiber optics can reach.


　　Getting used to being motherless is taking longer than I thought possible. Even though it"s been six years since my mother died, many things still trigger thoughts of her: seeing her birthday or anniversary date on the calendar, wearing her wedding ring, dusting the brass candlesticks she bought overseas, sniffing the aroma of meat loaf in a cafeteria (it"s not as good as hers), or glimpsing an intensely pink sky at sundown, a near duplicate of the one that appeared the day she was buried.


　　Common sense tells me these reminders will lessen in frequency and intensity as the years pass. Or will they? My friend Frances recently told me, "My mother died over thirty years ago, and I still miss her so much."


　　Why does the loss of a mother seem different than other losses? Maybe it"s the unique mother-daughter relationship that causes motherless daughters like me to feel our grief for years while concealing it like a box of old love letters high on a shelf. The immense expectations connected with a mother"s role leaves us struggling with the void she"s left behind. The one we thought would always be there for us - nurturing, loving, caring - now no longer is. Suddenly we find ourselves measuring the future in terms of mother-absence. Mother won"t see her grandchildren born. Mother won"t attend her oldest grandson"s graduation. Mother won"t be escorted down the aisle first in her granddaughter"s wedding. But even those painful thoughts are clung to because they represent a connection, a remembrance.


　　Jeanette, a friend who lost her mother three years ago, calls her difficult moments "grief points" - times when she suddenly feels the loss of what was or what could have been. With the realization that her mother, an excellent seamstress, would no longer be there to make a wedding dress for her someday, Jeanette was left with a poignant sense of future loss.


　　My grief points usually involve past losses, regrets over the times my mother and I failed to communicate. If I could pick up the phone today and reach her, would we get beyond small talk to deeper issues? Because she lived seven hundred miles away (and often seemed intimidated by the phone), we postponed those conversations for our semi-annual visits. Then there never seemed to be enough time or privacy - until she was dying.


　　During that seven-week period, our conversations went well beyond the books we were reading or current events. We talked about life and death, past and present hurts. The mother-daughter bond grew stronger (better late than not at all)。 I thank God for those times, at the same time wondering what might have happened if He"d chosen to grant miraculous healing.


　　Why didn"t we communicate better earlier? I was simply "too busy." While I was caring for a growing family, the years rushed by in a flurry of activity. My mother said she understood because she"d been there. She even boasted to her friends about how complicated my life was. But after finding a packet of my old letters in her bureau drawer while emptying her house, I regret not writing her more. I, too, often played that foolish game of "I"ll write her when she writes me." A game where nobody won. My mother frequently described herself (pretty accurately) as "the world"s worst letter writer." This was evidenced by a note she wrote me in college that included a sentence about having the cast taken off her leg. I called home immediately and found out she"d broken her ankle two months earlier but neglected to mention it!


　　Although physical distance kept us apart most of our adult lives, I wish I"d been better at bridging the emotional distance that sometimes separated us. Now I realize I shouldn"t have expected it to be a fifty-fifty proposition; one person usually needs to give more in order to keep communication open.


　　Ironically, I"ve come to understand my mother better now that she"s gone. It recently occurred to me that I never saw her cry. She undoubtedly had many reasons to cry: a traumatic childhood with an abusive father, the loss of her first husband in World War II, a turbulent marriage to my father (an alcoholic), and multiple health problems and surgeries.


　　After she died, I found a poem in her Bible that spoke of accepting what comes into our lives without complaint ("whatever is, is best") because it comes through the hands of a loving God. Apparently, she believed that. Even though she didn"t come to a personal relationship with Christ until several years before she died, she never harbored anger against God for the way her life turned out. Thinking of her perseverance and strength gives me a fresh appreciation for her attributes.


　　On this continuing grief journey, I"m learning not to look at the past through rose-colored glasses, to succumb to the temptation to make a martyr of my mother (she would have hated that!), or to idealize her with a perfection no human being merits. Neither do I blame her for any childhood deficiencies, not even the ones for which she apologized. She gave me what she was capable of giving at the time. And I"ve forgiven her for the times when that wasn"t enough, as I hope my children will forgive me.


　　When I was about five years old, I used to climb onto my mother"s lap and say, "I love you. I have the best mommy in the whole wide world." It seemed to embarrass her because she never knew exactly how to respond. The reason became clear when she explained to me on her deathbed that, for some unknown reason, the words "I love you" had always been hard for her to say.


　　Sometimes when I think of her now, I don"t see her as I last did - in her sixties, frail and bedridden as she lost her second battle with cancer. Instead, when life knocks me around and I find myself suddenly inexplicably wanting my mother, I picture her as the beautiful twenty-eight-year-old woman she once was and myself as a child again. I climb onto her lap and say, "I love you. I have the best mommy in the whole wide world."


　　But this time my mother puts her arms around me and says, "I love you, Honey. I have the best daughter in the whole wide world." And it is enough.


　　Maybe when I join her in heaven, we"ll have a chance to try it again.
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