Mom’s Birthday

Joyce Peachey Lind

My mother’s birthday was in April. If she were still living she would have turned 82 this year. She died over ten years ago, but of course I always think of her on her birthday.

I didn’t know my grandmother, who died when I was a baby. I remember asking, when I was a child, if my mother remembered Grandma. My mom could describe her, tell about her, remember her vividly, and I wondered how she could do that, when her mother had been dead for such a long time.

Now I know. When I think about my mother, sometimes it is like seeing snapshots in my mind, real ones and imagined ones. Other times I hear her laugh, see her expressions, remember her gestures, and watch her like I’m watching a movie.

In my mind I see her walking down the lane to get the mail, at the farm where I was born and where my parents retired. I see her working in the garden, lovingly tending the flowers she and my dad planted everywhere. I see her standing at the kitchen counter, looking over her list of things to do for the day, reading her Bible as she sits at the dining room table, praying for her children, shedding tears as she prays for them and the struggles they are going through. I hear my mother singing and laughing with her sisters, giggling at a joke, gently reading to her grandchildren.

My sister and I laughed when we went through my mother’s purse after she died. Mom’s purses, stylish but practical, always contained the same things over the years—Tic Tacs or mints, a wallet with a coin purse, a small white Bible she carried at her wedding, a cloth hanky, a nail file, a comb, and always, always, several crumpled tissues. 

I’m pretty sure the tissues were new, unused, but as a child when I was in church and needed to blow my nose, I was horrified to receive a crumpled tissue from the bottom of mom’s purse. If necessity warranted its use, it smelled minty, and I was never really sure if it had been used for a quick wipe and then returned, or if it had simply been lying dormant, waiting for a first use. 

Several months after her death we looked through her purse, and sure enough, there were the crumpled tissues. Again we laughed as we clung to them, squeezed them, and finally tossed them.

Though she died so long ago, in a moment I am at her side, in the hospital emergency room with my father, my brother, and my aunt. We hover around her, glancing anxiously at each other.

Despite her cancer diagnosis, her treatment had been making her feel better, she was recovering it seemed, and we were optimistic that she would live several more weeks, perhaps months. But suddenly in the middle of the night she couldn’t breathe easily, and my husband drove the four miles out and back on icy roads to take her with my father to the ER.

We listen to her labored breathing, and look at her lying on the white hospital table with a cap on to warm her. Her eyes are closed. When my father asks the doctor—who has been called into the emergency room on an icy, treacherous night—what is happening, the doctor says in a monotone voice that I still resent, "You know she’s dying." My aunt, a nurse, quietly shows me my mother’s bluish fingernails.

I don’t fully understand until several minutes later, when we see her go, and we call out to her as if she can hear us, as if she can hold on just a few moments longer so we can say good-bye.

Death is powerful. It separates, darkens, and alienates. There is nothing that I have experienced that has left me so empty, that has stated finality so clearly as watching my mother die.

My faith, nurtured by years of Sunday school, comforted me in the days following my mother’s death. The words from the hymn "My Life Flows On in Endless Song" became a source of strength as I imagined clinging to God the rock and keeping my "inmost calm" despite the storm.

Weeks and months later, however, I railed against God, inwardly kicking and screaming at the injustice of mortality and the pain and separation that it brings. As I mourned the loss of my mother I found I was distancing myself from those Sunday school teachings, and questioning the certainty of life after death.

Recently renowned physicist Stephen Hawking announced his belief that "there is no heaven or afterlife . . . it is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." I was drawn to articles about him, curious to know what "proof" this scientist had that would cause him to make that declaration. But as I read his interview, I wondered how anyone could really know—with certainty—that there isn’t life after death?
I often stand somewhere in between—not always committed to a belief in a heaven where St. Peter stands at the gate and angels in shiny white robes beckon us with harmonious singing. And yet not able to say with conviction that there cannot be anything else beyond this life.

In the past couple of years I have come to believe more deeply in the possibility of a joyous reunion, a time when death no longer separates. Despite Sunday school teachings that tell me that we will be with God in a place called heaven, I am not absolutely sure what that means. I hope it means I will again be with my mother and others that I love. I hope it means that we join spirits and find an existence with God in a way that is joyful beyond our wildest dreams. 

But the certainty piece is something I continue to wrestle with.
Perhaps our memories of loved ones who have died give us a glimpse of what it means to live in hope for God’s ability to overcome the separation of death. The memories I have of my mother are not the same as seeing her and being with her. But as I remember her I know that she was real. As I hold on to the parts of her that I have—a purse, crumpled tissues, photos, memories—a part of her remains.

As Easter arrived this year, the flowers that my mother planted were blooming, a reminder of her cheerful spirit and her love of nature’s beauty. For me they also represent the hope that death is not the end. Despite darkness and separation there is a possibility for new life and holy reunions beyond our imaginings.

—Joyce Peachey Lind lives with her husband and two children in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She enjoys hearing about the world from the perspective of her first grade students.