I sit in the car, staring at Mother’s house, waiting for the rest of the family to arrive. My sister, Libby. Her daughter, Carol. My own daughter, Amy Jo. The numbness is starting to wear off now, and I feel grief gripping my heart. Mother had died just weeks earlier. She was only 74.
She loved this place. She always said she wanted to go straight from here to heaven. And she almost had. Just a few days in the hospital after the stroke.
I sigh at the thought of what awaits us. The shelves crowded with knickknacks, stacks of magazines, cupboards and cabinets stuffed with a lifetime of…stuff. On the porch sits a cement goose, its purple bonnet askew and, through tears, I smile.
Purple. Mother loved that color! From the carpet on the floor to the kitchen cabinets, she had surrounded herself with shades of purple and lavender. Bold. And always joyful.
Libby and the girls arrive and I step out of the car. What do I hope to find here among Mother’s possessions? The things I treasure most about her I already hold in my heart. Still, I’m her daughter. I have to do this.
“The dishes are yours,” Libby says. She opens the china cabinet and begins wrapping up plates and stemware. After every big family meal Mother would wave her hand over the dirty plates and half-filled bowls.
“Someday, Mary Lou, all these lovely pieces will be yours,” she’d say. “So you might as well get acquainted with them now.” We’d all laugh as my sister and I cleared the table and got busy washing my inheritance in the kitchen sink.
Now I put the wrapped dishes in a box. How many meals my mother prepared! Heaping portions for anyone who graced her table. As a child I’d helped her make meals for struggling families and shut-ins. Every summer we’d can hundreds of jars of vegetables–and give them away all winter.
I nest the dishes on top of one another. I will use these for my own family meals. And remember how big my “family” needs to be.
“Look what I found,” my niece calls from the back room. We huddle around a tiny white box Carol is holding. She lifts the lid, revealing two small circles of gold resting on white cotton.
Mother’s and Daddy’s wedding rings. Mother slipped Daddy’s ring off his finger at his funeral 20 years ago, just before his casket was closed.
“I’ll take Daddy’s,” Libby says, slipping the band on her index finger. “You take Mom’s.”
The gold feels solid in my palm. Mother’s marriage had not always been easy, yet she remained faithful to Daddy. To the vow she had taken when she was only 17.
When Daddy was dying of cancer Mother hardly left his side, even to eat and sleep. Love? Certainly. But more than that. She would keep the promise she’d made: “Till death do us part.” It took commitment to make a marriage strong. Sacrifice.
I slip Mother’s ring on my pinkie, next to my own. It fits perfectly.
“Anybody want this?” My niece holds up Mother’s church directory.
“Sure,” I say. I leaf through the pages of names and pictures. So many people I remember from my childhood. Thelma, who played the organ. Murl Weimer–a tiny, bent man with a huge heart. Nellie Fisher, my kindergarten Sunday school teacher.
I notice words, written in pencil, across several of the photos: “Gone to heaven.” Mother’s handwriting. I picture her here at the kitchen table–perhaps just after serving a funeral dinner for a family–as she writes those three words.
I rummage through a drawer to find a pencil and then look for Mother’s picture in the church directory. How confident she was of where her loved ones were. Her confidence gives me certainty too. “Gone to heaven” I write across her picture, in a script not unlike Mother’s own.
After we finish, my sister and I stand together on the porch for a moment, exhausted by work and grief.
“Have a safe trip,” she says.
I nod and make my way to the car. Boxes and pictures, a piece of stained glass and stacks of books fill every inch of space inside. I slip the key in the ignition, but I can’t bring myself to turn it. I’m not ready.
I remember when Mother came to visit me in the last autumn of her life. It was a big deal for her to come to the farthest corner of Indiana, a four-hour drive across the state. She’d set her affairs in order, locked up her little house and become part of our family’s routine for a week.
One afternoon I took her out to Lake Michigan. She sat in the car and watched the waves while I did my usual three-mile walk. This was the most water Mother, a Kentucky girl, had ever seen. All that sand. The waves. The sheer power. It fascinated her.
When I’d finished my walk, I knocked the sand off my shoes and slid into the driver’s seat. “I have a present for you!” I said, handing her a huge, perfect brown leaf.
“What does it mean?” she asked, lifting the leaf so the sun illuminated its intricate veining.
“Well, I know how much you dread winter every year, so think of this as your own personal piece of hope,” I said. “Spring will come again and so will new leaves.”
A month before she died, I drove down to see her. A brutal winter–and recurring health problems–had kept her inside for weeks. We were in the tiny spare bedroom when she reached on top of the secretary and pulled down that brown, brittle leaf.
“See,” she said, a familiar twinkle in her eye. “I still have hope.”
Now I look down at the leaf, resting on a tissue on the seat beside me. It is disintegrating, too fragile to handle. But the hope it represents is fresh. Alive. Eternal.
Mother used to admonish me, totally serious, her finger wagging, to never tell anyone I had “lost” my mother. “Nothing is ever lost as long as you know where it is.”
She was right. Mother is not lost. Her remains rest in a quaint little cemetery, where come summer the birds will sing to the sound of the wind rustling through the cornfields.
But Mother, her soul, is in heaven. She is also part of every person who ever sat in one of her Sunday school classes. Or savored one of her jars of canned green beans. Every individual who found food for both body and soul in her cozy kitchen.
And in a very real sense, Mother is here. With me. With her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Nothing of beauty is ever lost. It is only changed– from glory into glory.
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