Dear Mom ...

Dear Mom,

It’s been only four days since you set off for the undiscovered country and, Oh!, how I miss you.  In the letter I wrote to you for Mother’s Day, I was recalling our trips to the wildlife refuge in Brigantine, New Jersey.  As our car would creep along the dirt roads that traced the fingers of land reaching out into the bay, we’d startle mother geese.  As they stood up, dozens of babies with yellow fluff for feathers would scatter in a panic.  Mom!  Where are you going?!  Now I know how those scattered babies felt.

Mom's crabapple in full bloom!

You often told the story about Grampy being laid out in Ruth’s parlor, and how you would talk to him while he was laying there in his coffin.  You even bumped into him with the vacuum cleaner.  It bothered you that you could never say what he was like after he died although you worked with him, scooping cranberries and picking blueberries, all your life.  It’s no wonder you felt at a loss for words:  Grampy was a world unto himself … and so are you, Mom.  He was your hero, and you are mine.  My mother, my mountain. 

I walked up Buck Mountain yesterday to let your departure sink in.  Nothing sunk in except my feet in inches of muck.  It was nice to find you out in that wilderness.  I had to cross a couple of beaver dams, and I thought about the hours we spent watching a colony of beavers working on the road to Indian Lake.  I also thought about my effort, sitting in Mr. Bennett’s ninth grade art class, trying to paint one of the mountains behind Queensbury High School—tree by tree.  I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t paint the forest without each tree.  That approach, as inefficient as it was for representing a mountain in paint on paper, is all about giving attention and love to each small thing.  I learned that way of seeing and being from you.  Just as I was and am unable to paint a mountain, I am also unable to say what you are like.  Any effort to do so feels like trying to hold the wind in a net.  Impossible.  You are too AMAZING.

“Live and let live.”  That was the lesson you reiterated to me in countless ways throughout our lives together.  Don’t try to pin people down with your words or with your mind.  Let them bounce, let them smile like blueberries, let them surprise you.  They will come around.  But you didn’t preach because you knew that words alone are not enough to touch a child or to bring an idea to life, to cause it to put down roots so it can develop and blossom.  Only a lived example can teach the beauty of labor, the fun of competition, the necessity of loyalty, and, most important of all, the vitality of a curious mind.  You gave all your children, in and out of the schoolroom, one heck of an example.

You didn’t like the facilities you lived in after you broke your hip:  The Home of the Good Shepard and Fort Hudson.  You called them prisons.  But it’s to your credit that you found an escape route.  You regaled your kids all winter long with stories of your drives to New Jersey.  You told us how you broke into the old house (without a flashlight!) and found your way to your mother’s bed.  “There was this old country woman, she had an apron on, and she remembered me from when I was a little girl and she nursed me, fed me a bottle.  She said, ‘I’d know you anywhere.’  She kind of watched over me, and when she left, she promised she’d see me again.  Oh, I had the sweetest sleep in that bed.”  With that story, you drew us all into the excitement and the sweet peace of regaining childhood, of making all things new, of going home.

My mother, my mountain, it seems fitting that you died under a photograph portrait of your favorite president, Abraham Lincoln.  Free at lastl!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty I’m free at last!  You’d planned with Patty, your Occupational Therapist, to go sky diving.  If George Bush could jump out of a plane as an octogenarian, then so could you.  Although you never got to live that adventure, you were beautiful and courageous as you took that big leap into God knows where, trusting that mother, sister, Nala, Joseph, and, of course, Jesus, were all there to ease your landing. 

It’s been really hard being in Michigan while you were struggling.  But every time I’d get ready to fly home to see you, I would think how your New Jersey family members, Lillian and Frank, Ruth and Philip, would get in their cars and trucks and drive north—fast!—every time you delivered one of us.  It was important to be the first to see the new arrival.  I, too, felt like I was rushing to a birth and not a death.  Because you were NEW each time—you had new stories, new friends, new ideas for adventures, and new foods you wanted to try. 

In the end, though I cannot say what you are like to my own satisfaction, it doesn’t trouble me.  I will go on thinking of you as my green, bejeweled, lovely, and ultimately mysterious mountain.  My necessary angel of the earth since in your eyes I see the earth again:  cows’ velvet noses, Fort Edward crocks with blue birds, Lancaster Rose teaspoons, morning mist on the lake, whippoorwills at twilight, trumpeter swans on the Batsto River, and every single tree on the mountainside.  Nice to remember that “mountain” or “mounty” was my sister Katie’s first word: not “Mama.” 

Stay with us always, mother, like the mountains.

Love always,

Mary Jo (your oldest)