Grief and Gratitude

Dear Friend,

I’m behind in my posting this month. While I can’t make any promises, I do hope to finish All the Flowers Kneeling in time to share something for December 1st, when we will also begin our next selection for the Contemplative Reading Project, The Gospel According to James Baldwin.

I want to explain my absence, and I suppose this is as good a place to start as any.

My mom, Penny, turned seventy-one on October 28th. I sent her a card that said, “Happy birthday to my first best friend.” On Sunday, November 16th, she was gone.

Mom believed in a benevolent magic that would somehow make all things good in the end. I’m grateful I share that belief with her, because it lets me picture where she might be now: laughing with her brother Wally; teasing my grandma Lorraine about how well the Bears are doing; embraced by my grandpa Lyle. I can see them picking up the conversations about God that we kept so privately, first me and Grandpa, then me and Mom. That quiet, stubborn hope that there is more than this.

My mom was a woman of wonder. She was strength and courage in a body that went through more than its share of pain. She had a kind of faith I eventually came to understand, one that put love forward, that was full of doubt and questions and combat. She was always searching. When her church told us they couldn’t provide a funeral for her father because he wasn’t a member, she was strong enough to keep her faith and find a new church. Later, when a pastor told her there was no place for me in his religion, she had the courage to tell him he was wrong, and to stand up and walk out.

Mom never cared if you were old or young, gay or straight, Christian or not. Race, pigment, these things truly never crossed her mind. Whoever you were, her only real question about you was, will you be a friend? When I came out, when I was figuring out my own sexuality and my place in the world, she met me there. With questions, with worry sometimes, but with love first and with unquestioning acceptance. Brokeback Mountain was released during my senior year of college; she called to say she heard it was a special story, and would I like to go with her? So we went, and it was the most embarrassing time I’ve ever spent in a movie theater, I’ll tell you that! But also, maybe one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. Her faith was all about opening doors, not shutting them. She watched the movies with me, had hard conversations with me, and learned effortlessly how to make room for the life and changes unfolding in front of me.

There are memories from our life that I can’t seem to escape right now.

One is parent night at a new school, my third in as many years. I was in fourth grade and terrified that no one would show up for me. Our parents worked a lot when we were young, so my sister and I were classic latchkey kids. We would walk or bike home from school and be on our own until dinner or later. And Mom was not in a good place then. She was at her heaviest, had only two front teeth while she waited on dentures, and she had just recently buzzed her head. She knew the kids would stare. She knew they would make fun of her. And some did. But I told her I needed her, and she showed up. For me.

She was my first fan and my always champion. She became team mom for little league, and I know that part of why I played so well and why we went to the World Series two years in a row is because she was there at every game, knew every kid’s name, organized pizza and awards nights, and even got our coach to encourage us with pranks, like shaving his head if we won (we did). Later, in college and adulthood, she was ready to show up and threaten even my professors and my landlord when she thought they were out of line. She was heartbroken when I moved to California, heartbroken when I moved to Nevada, but still there to help me through it each time. At sixty years old, she spent a year painting 150 ceramic pieces for our wedding. At sixty-three, she drove Jesse’s car all the way to Las Vegas because he doesn’t like to drive. And when Jesse was injured not long ago, she was ready to get on the first flight, even though she was also struggling herself.

But the strongest thing she ever did might seem like the simplest: she kept going.

Despite a lifetime of emotional distress and physical pain. Despite relentless thoughts that she wasn’t good enough. Despite one injury after another, one health setback on top of the next, wish after wish that it could all just be over. She kept going despite it all. She stayed.

I have been grateful to her for so many things my whole life. But more than anything, I am grateful that she stayed. That she gave me as much time as she possibly could. Because so long as she stayed, I knew who I was.

Through so many changes in my own life—weight loss and gain, a suicide attempt and recovery, coming out and getting married, becoming a doctor and changing religions. I grew and I learned, and my life kept moving in ways neither of us could have predicted, but I was always, underneath all of it, me. I was the boy who could text his mom during the Bears game and know that, wherever she was, she was watching too. Two weeks ago, I woke up the same boy, ready to text my mom throughout the game, the way we always did. Then, suddenly, I was an old man listening to a game I couldn’t see, reaching for a phone that no longer works.

I’m a person whose person is gone.

I can’t lie. I’ve been full of anger and guilt, and I have been praying for grief. Praying for grief because when the grief comes, the fullness I feel, this heavy, lying fullness that keeps telling me it’s emptiness, will crack open. And when it does, all the good things about my mom will be able to get back in. Her courage. Her questions. Her belief in a universe that values kindness and love. Her laugh. Her stubborn, ridiculous, beautiful hope that things would somehow work out.

And alongside that grief, something else has already started to make its way in. Gratitude. Not just for her, but for the people who have circled around us. For the friends and family who have called and texted, who have sat with us in silence, who have brought food and stories and hugs to fill up rooms that suddenly felt too large. For the people who showed up to her celebration of life and told me who she was to them. In their faces, in their memories and the photos they shared, I can see the shape of her love reflected back at me.

Grief tells me what I’ve lost. Gratitude reminds me what I was given and what I must honor. I have my sister and my family. I have friends who check in. I have a husband who holds my hand when I don’t know how to stand. I have a lifetime of texts and voicemails and stories, and a stadium’s worth of people who were touched by a woman who kept going when it would have been easier to stop.

Thank you, Mom, for staying as long as you did. For giving us as much of you as you possibly could. I don’t want to know a world where I can’t text you or call you when something wonderful or terrible happens. I’ve been tempted to try so many times already. But I know that whoever I am from here on out, you’re in it. Wherever I go, you will be there.

My champion. My biggest fan. My first friend.

My mom.

~Adam

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