Holding The Light

how we honour our dead

**This is an extrapolated version of a post I uploaded to Instagram on Sunday**

A few months after my mother turned 57, she discovered she was being rather rapidly consumed by cancer. So hungry were the tumours to feed on her incredible spirit that only a few weeks after she turned 58, she died. I was sad for a long time.

I wore a purple dress to her funeral, and noted with irony how she’d been dressed in a suit she hadn’t been able to fit into for years. Growing up, my mother was often on one diet or another, usually those that involved eating the kind of inedible food you’d never think to serve a guest. There was the cottage cheese diet, the half-a-grapefruit diet and the one where you where only allowed to eat two bowls of cabbage soup per day. The most common outcome with each was depression, it being simply impossible to feel happy with only boiled cabbage to comfort you. But here she was, at the end of it all, finally in her slim fitting suit. Who knew all she’d needed to do to reach her goal weight was to die, slowly at first and then suddenly all at once?

I was 26 when it happened, and entirely unprepared to live without my mother. I remember coming home from the funeral and lying on her bed, the bed I still slept next to her in when my father was working away and I’d travel up for the weekend. I had been a fractious teenager, barely concealing my disdain for the level to which she just did not get it - as if smoking cigarettes in secret and pining after boys I was too scared to talk to had given me an expansive insight into life that she couldn’t possibly imagine. I frequently pressed her buttons, and kept secrets young girls shouldn’t be keeping. On more than one occasion, I screamed I hate you!, simultaneously enjoying the feeling of having hurt her and yet terrified it might be the unforgivable last straw.

But even on my worst days, when the starkly lit terrain of adolescence and all its magnified insecurities gave way to the blanket of night, I would sometimes sneak into her bed and curl up next to her, wrapping my arm over her waist and smelling the familiar scent of her skin, her hair and whatever deeper cellular code had first announced itself to me as being unmistakably her as twirled without fear in the swirling galaxy of her womb.

Mother.

I lay on her bed that day, breathing in the fading scent of this most primal of communications for the last time, and thought of her body being loaded into a incinerator somewhere that was not here, her soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it having already departed for a different somewhere else that was also not here. I began to cry and panic all at once, unable to grasp the enormity of what had finally arrived at last - her absence. The huge, mother-shaped hole she’d left, the one that could never be filled no matter how many things you tried to shove into it, but that could also never be ignored because when you ignore a giant hole and pretend it’s not there, you’re very likely to fall right in it.

Now I’m middle aged, and I can’t say that my preparedness to live without my mother has necessarily improved. But I have learned to accommodate the hole of her absence. It’s a part of my landscape now, and I tend to it with love and care the way she would have wanted. I’ve planted flowers around its border, roses and jasmine and lavender and all the other ones that attract the bees. I’ve kept a little space clear, and sometime I sit there, dangling my legs over the edge and gazing into the unending depths of its existence. Having made peace with the hole, I see how beautiful it is. Everything lives here, everything she was and could have been. All the music she loved, the books she read, the films she watched, the hopes and dreams she had - they’re all here. She lives in an archive of memories in the flower lined hole that I see now cannot ever be filled, because I will never run out of things to tell her or ask her or remember about her or want for her. The conversation that began with the pulse of her heartbeat coaxing me into life will never end, because there will always be something more to say about what it all means.

In her poem “After The Fire”, Ada Limon says that grief’s hold is “is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.” Losing my mother is still the most profound grief I’ve ever experienced, but wisdom and age has made me glad for its existence. Its ever present shadow reminds me that love can never be diminished by something as inevitable as death. My mother goes on living, expanding forever into the cells her body breathed life into, my cells, and everything that body, my body, goes on to touch and leave behind. The ashes of her once organic container long ago merged with the sea, but the spirit - the light that is her namesake - is an irrepressible flame.

This past Saturday would have been her 75th birthday. (Aries on the cusp of Taurus, which makes so much sense now.) A 75th birthday is an occasion worth celebrating, even if circumstances necessitate being one guest short. And so I invited three old friends and three new friends to come for dinner to honour her. I filled the dining room with flowers, set up an altar and asked my guests to bring an offering. We read poems and told stories, and laughed like bandicoots. My (old) friend Heather shared a poem about the night sky, and my (new) friend Ruth played haunting folk songs on her banjo. My old friends made new friends and vice versa, which was part of the spell work I was weaving into the night. My mother died too young to make new friends that would become old ones, and I feel the enormity of that with every year that I add to my own runs on the board. The mother-shaped hole has taught me to live with respect for the fragility of time. It all goes by too quickly to waste.

But here’s the thing about that hole. The more time you spend with it, the more you can hear it calling back to you. As I stood in front of the oven that night, my friends falling into easy conversation across the kitchen island, “Moon River” began to play on the stereo. It wasn’t necessarily a favourite of my mother’s, but I’ve weirdly been hearing it a lot lately and in unexpected places. I began to sing along and I suddenly felt her standing behind me. I knew if I turned to look, the spell would be broken. And so I kept singing, my heart’s eye opening up to look for her instead.

And there she was. Swaying behind me, singing with me, her arms wrapped around my waist just the way she’d hold me when I was young. Thank you, I felt her say. I’m here. I love you. I wept, and the tears were both happy and sad.

Just like life.

Happy birthday Luciana, light of my night sky. I wish every day that you could be with me.

But then, you were and always will be, until we meet again.