What I Want You to Have Before You Need It

A Mother's Letter to Her Children

I won’t reveal which of my grown children finally raised the topic, but I was glad to offer an answer to a question I’d been mulling and hoping to be asked.

"Mom, what's the most important lesson you learned now that you're…you know…this old?"

“Try not to fear loss and being alone,” I replied. “Being afraid of either is stifling, and no one is ever prepared to be either deeply bereaved or feeling all by themselves when they’d rather not be. The lesson is to face both without letting them rule you.”

No one wants a lecture from their mother, so I stopped right there. But here’s the rest of the response I wrote out later, to be recovered when I’m no longer around to help as needed.

From the first separation—when a newborn infant enters a new, limitless space—there is a kind of grief.  In time, new bonds form. Intimacy grows and changes over time. Breakaways and chasms happen as a child grows up. Then comes adult autonomy: a child grows into their own personhood.

The journey of life and love is both precious and indescribably difficult. Things may sail gently along for a while, but grief eventually arrives, often as a jolt. We're never ready to lose anyone or anything we hold close to heart. There are other kinds of losses, too. The inevitable changes that come with growing older are losses that creep up on you, especially when you look in the mirror and think: “The landscape of my body has changed!” We can do our best to hang on to what we believe to be our best selves, but we can’t avoid our own transformations should we live long enough to experience them. We change right along with the times. With these changes come benefits and losses.

Remnants of accumulated losses persist in signs and symbols throughout our lives. Sometimes I hear music I listened to as each of you was growing up, and I feel a little memory ping in my heart. I turn suddenly in public places at any random call of “MOM!” and probably always will. In this way, life is bittersweet. Change is what life and we do, all along, and not all changes have defined, predictable beginnings and ends. By now, you each have an idea of what I’m talking about here, and it doesn’t sound as sappy as perhaps it once did, when I told you things like “The baby-you is gone, but each time I look at you, I see you that way still.” Aww, Mom.

Loss isn't only what happens to us. Sometimes it lives in unrealized hopes, missed opportunities, or paths we never took. I look back and see times I missed being or doing my best. I have enough that I know the lessons they carry. Negative feelings have a way of sapping us and diverting our energy from the good still ahead of us, the possibilities surrounding us. So focus on lessons learned when you can, rather than regrets.

Recovering one’s sense of self from the piercing pain of serious loss— I hesitate to use the word “healing”— involves much more than patching up and moving on. It's seeing cracks and voids as places where precious insights and memories can alight. There is more to heaven and earth than our philosophies can contain, Shakespeare said in language that still resonates.

Use such words as a balm upon your wounds. Take time to reflect on your own spiritual wellness, and find language, melody, resonance, and imagery that comforts you. Seek life-affirming ideas and metaphors. My grandmother, Dorothy, used to tell me birds carried secret messages only she and I could decipher. When together, we shared our cryptic secrets, all true in the name of the love we shared. She was the only person who literally sang with me. The words and songs of her lifetime often return to me like birds flocking to the feeders on cold winter days. There are messages hidden in clouds and trees and rivers, reminders of love and connection that travel with you if you learn how to notice them. Gran’s been dead 36 years, and I still pay careful attention to birds.

That's the lesson I am trying to give you here, along with something else I know to be true.

Sorrow can leave you feeling helpless and bereft. We are forever changed by it. We humans are, beneath the bluster and various roles we play, ever so vulnerable. Please do not let that knowledge ever leave you hopeless. Let both sorrow and gladness pass through you, be responsible for your own well-being, and open your center to receive life itself, as it happens, as it is. It’s your kingdom within, and when honored and well-tended, it attracts beauty to your world all the days of your life.

This is what I bring when I sit beside someone in their loss, and how I hold myself together when life becomes very difficult. We are each so vulnerable. Yet even in sorrow, life continues to offer moments of beauty, connection, and meaning. Keep your heart open to them.