Mourning Is Electric

A complete stranger, during a business call on Wednesday, became an articulate and insightful grief counselor who had lost her own mother a few years ago. "It's a life-shifting event," she told me. "Lean into the pain. Let it out, whether it be a whimper or a sob fest."

I’m doing well, I think. Sad for me, happy for my mom, full of memories good and bad, feeling like an orphan, being businesslike in attending to Mom’s estate, juggling everything at a time when I feel oddly weak and incapable. Following in that stranger's footsteps, my daughters and I held a wonderful ceremonial gathering at the ocean in memory of our mother and grandmother.

I took an armful of my garden flowers. We went to a beach where my mother and father used to take my brothers and me.

One by one we took a flower and thought of some wonderful thing embodied by my mother when she was younger, before the Alzheimer's took her away from us. Then we threw the flower into the sea.

It was a powerfully lovely thing to do.

Mom seemed very near, free at last and whole again.