A reader writes: Today I visited your site for the first time, and I have decided to share something I wrote with you. This fall I lost my mother less than a week before my son's wedding. I have been grieving both my empty nest (all three of my adult children have moved on with their lives) and the loss of my mother. Each time I feel lonely or sad because my children have grown and left the nest, I feel deep pain for having caused my mother the same grief. Relationships with parents are complicated: expectations, irritations, personality quirks, being a 47-year-old daughter, and all the rest. Along with the emotional connectedness we shared, my grief also includes the loss of my mother as a friend.
And I miss her support and constant love, always there whenever I needed it — something I most definitely undervalued. She was there to call, from Illinois to California, just to chat, connect, share trivia about my kids or grandchild, or exchange recipes. Anyway, I write to thank you for your thoughtful site, and also to send you a poem. I wrote this with one of my sisters in my mind and heart — her loving eyes mirroring her feelings of loss, and how I feel experiencing my own emotion of loss:
Pooling
Your love
Spills
Silent streams
Slide down
The slope of your cheek
Past an upturned smile
Strangled
My throat
A choking frog
Croaks
My response: Thank you so much for sending me your extraordinary poem expressing your heartfelt feelings about the emotion of loss, and for sharing your thoughts with me about losing your mother.
As the parent of two grown sons, I, too, know the feelings you describe. The older I get, the more I realize how wise my mother was, and I miss her terribly. When she was alive, I completely underestimated the pain she endured as a mother and the anxiety she must have suffered simply from worrying silently about her own grown children. Now that I am in her place, I know firsthand that a mother never, ever stops worrying about her children, no matter how old they become. In many ways, it is even harder than when they were little or adolescents, because the choices they make as adults are completely beyond our control — and yet we must accept and live with the consequences of those choices.
The hardest thing for me to do as my sons grew older was to respect them as adults, trust in their decisions, and, once I had shared my wisdom, keep my doubts and worries to myself. Now, of course, I see that this ability was one of my mother's greatest gifts — but I did not recognize it at the time.
I can also tell you that you will never completely stop missing your mother. She will always be a part of you, and the bond you share with her will remain forever, as long as you keep her memory alive in your heart.
If I may have your permission to post your beautiful poem on my Grief Healing website, I would love to place it in the Comfort for Grieving Hearts section, with proper attribution, of course.
In any case, I wish you and your loved ones a warm and peaceful holiday, and I thank you again for taking the time to write to me.
[Note: Permission to publish this beautiful poem was subsequently granted by the reader, and it now appears on Grief Healing’s Comfort for Grieving Hearts page.]
- Mom's Memory Was My 'Something Blue'
- Mother Loss: A List of Suggested Resources
- Mother Loss: When Can I Think of Her Without Crying?
- My Bizzare Childhood Wish Showed Up in My Mom's Cremains
- Parent Loss: Keeping Memories Alive
- Remembering My Mom on Mother's Day
- When Mother's Day Hurts: Selected Resources
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