Sorrowful Day
Helped bury the mother of a friend yesterday. Sad business as always. She left behind a husband of seventy years and a home they’d lived in for fifty-six. An anomalous couple in this day and age of turnover marriages and turnover homes, where there is always something new and better just around the corner. I met her once, at my friend’s house. The departed mother was quick to laugh and had a bright smile. I wish I’d known her longer, but I know her daughter so that will have to do.
The daughter in question is a child of the mother in that there is always a quick laugh and a bright smile. And as the departed mother did with her neighbors, my friend and her family wrapped me in their warm embrace last year when I was still struggling with the death of my wife. They fed me, took me places, and showed me a great deal of kindness. They were the sort of actions that would have made a parent proud if the parent had known, but when that’s what expected you don’t really get slaps on the back for doing the obvious. You just do it.
Now, however, we’re all left with the same tattered reality; people you love often die, and I am sad for my friend. But I believe she will endure because she is her mother’s child. She will wrap the thread of sorrow around her and wear it with unvanquished pride. She will do as her mother wanted in this quote from Emerson, “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have success.” Because that’s how you honor a parent.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale