Learning how to mourn

Learning how to mourn

I lost my Mom this week and I don’t quite know how to feel. I know how the church I was raised in says I should feel and yes, I am sad. I will miss her wit, her independent energy and her natural sense of fashion, but I have been missing that for about twenty years now.

The person that physical and cognitive decline carried away so many years ago was an impressive character. I wish you could have known her. She was always gracious and usually light-hearted, but she was also a person of high maintenance. As a function of her profession, she always had a stunning wardrobe, but she was also very disciplined about her appearance and would never, ever leave the house unless lipstick, eyeliner, hair and heels were meticulously in place.

My mom would never have considered herself to be even remotely associated with the women’s liberation movement, but circumstances forced her to be a single, working mom during a time when women simply didn’t do that. As a pre-war child, she grew up dreaming about getting married and having nice kitchen appliances, but life gave her a bad marriage, a mortgage and a pair of bratty kids.

The way she went about it belongs in a movie treatment. After decades of being an Air Force wife and a stay-at-home mom, the most current work experience she was able to put on her resume was her position as Vice President of the Officer’s Wives Club. That’s it. She had worked as a dance instructor for Authur Murray studios in the 1950s, and before that she was a “soda jerk,” yet in the early 1970s, she managed to launch what turned out to be a successful fashion retail career in the Washington DC suburbs. It’s hard for us now to appreciate how much grit that required, but she had it.

Now she’s gone, and trying to understand the role of a grieving son. Perhaps you have noticed that we humans become rather upset when one of our own succumbs to the inevitable, but I feel like I’m not doing my job. Instead of the outward signs of grief and blubbering, or the profound, paralyzing sadness that our culture expects of me, I find myself consumed by larger questions about existence and purpose. Where did she fit into the big picture? Where do any of us fit? How should she be remembered?

My best answer would be that she was an inspiration for a lot of people, and probably never knew it. In her stores, she employed dozens of what we were then allowed to call “girls.” Her girls were mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties. She was a mother and a sister to all of them and they looked up to her. Naturally, as a young man in my teens, I took a profound interest in Mom’s personnel roster, and I am fortunate to still be in touch with a few of her coworkers today. I haven’t told them yet. I don’t know what to say, but I find myself eager to reconnect with people who knew her at her zenith. That’s what I want to recall, and a little bit of validation would go a long way right now.

I have always been a fan of the author Joseph Campbell, who was a master of comparative religion and culture. He was encyclopedic about death rituals ranging from the Greeks to the Romans, in Eastern religions, native cultures and in our own Abrahamic traditions. He could go into great detail about similarities and differences associated with death across cultures, but I don’t recall him describing the void, or the emptiness of grief. He missed that part.

Now as my sister and I discuss the prospects of a memorial service for my mother, I can’t help but be reminded that I am lousy at funerals. In the 27 years I’ve lived in Nebraska, I have only attended three, and one of those was a favor for my wife. I don’t dodge funerals out of disrespect for the person who passed. Oh no. Quite the opposite. I skip funerals because they seldom do justice to the person being remembered.

What’s the funeral process again? We start with a refresher course on the whole heaven/hell ecosystem (in case we had forgotten) and that is followed by a relative we’ve never met mispronouncing a few pages of the Bible. The reading is followed by the niece who can’t sing, and then we eat.

Do I want that for my Mom? No. Can I think of anything better? Not at the moment. I just wish we could zip back to the 1970s and let me introduce you to her. Then, you could remember too.