Poetry on the Loss of a Mother

Thanksgiving is over, and now Christmas is headed our way. I'll try to stay happy, but it's hard since Mom died on December 23rd nearly three years ago. Losing Mom was a big shock to me, even thought she was 92 years old at the time. Logically, I knew she would die at some point, but I still wasn't ready to have her go. I guess that's the way no matter at what age your loved one dies. She died of pneumonia. My older brother found her struggling to breathe and called an ambulance. She was put on oxygen at the hospital, but she had been sick and was old, so she didn't have the strength to fight the illness. She died several days later. I kept waffling on whether or not I should fly down to Florida to be with her. After all, she'd come through everything else. I underestimated the seriousness of pneumonia and I never made it to be at her side. By the time I'd decided to go, she had already passed.

I remember saying in one grief group that perhaps my mom hadn't wanted me to see her that way. So many others who made it to be with their mothers felt this probably wasn't so. Mom tried to tell me something just before she died. I can still imagine her telling me that she didn't want me to fly down there. Mom was selfless like that.

I guess I was surprised at how much losing Mom hurt. After all, I had visited her in Florida only occasionally, and our relationship had been difficult at time because she had trouble saying that she loved me. Of course, after being hurt by my dad, it's no wonder she shut down her feelings. Still, my older brother thinks she was always like that and that was a problem between her and Dad. I guess I'll never know for sure.

I did a lot to try to come to terms with having lost Mom. I wrote poems about loss and having lost Mom in particular nearly every day. I created a memorial for Mom on my piano, her box of ashes surrounded by things I bought to remind me of her. I went to estate sales just as Mom and I had gone to yard sales in days gone by. I had my grandmother's ring (which I inherited) sized to fit me and cleaned up. I had the bracelet I found that Dad had given to Mom during WWII restored. I talked and cried to my therapist, and I forced myself to get out of the house. I met with friends for lunch (and cried there, too). Some didn't understand, because they hadn't yet lost their parents. Others did and just let me cry. I even had a memorial at my house.

I called my older brother and told him that nobody would call me "Jean Marie" anymore, so he deliberately called me "Jean Marie" at the end of each conversation. <3

At the end of the first year, I gathered up all of the poems I'd written about Mom and loss, studied on how to prepare them for Amazon Kindle publication, and self-published my book, Poetry on the Loss of a Mother. I hoped that reading my raw emotions would help others to appreciate that they weren't alone with their pain.

Then, I typed up the contents of a memory book Mom had written about her life growing up in a tourist home in Richmond, Virginia, and self-published that, also. The story included Mom's account of having lived with my bipolar, alcoholic father and how she found happiness again when she moved to Florida after he died. I self-published this as Lost But Not Forgotten: My Mother's Life, also through Amazon.com. I had some poems about other topics left over so I published another poetry book called My Poetry Bouquet. Then, one day when I was substitute teaching in kindergarten, I mentioned to the kids that I was an author. They wanted me to write a story for them. I wrote two children's poetry books: Poems from the Schoolyard and A Child's Poetry Companion: Poems from the Countryside. Odd that I'd let my writing lapse for so long and it was restored after Mom died.

Now I am writing a book about my life and I'm trying to come up with a picture book that publishers will want to publish. I think it's be great to be able to read my own book to the children for whom I substitute teach.

So here we are, going on three years. The therapy and meds I take have helped. Everything else I mentioned helped. Still, I'm sure that the 23rd will be hard on me. I'm trying to decide whether or not to work on that day this year. We'll see how things go...