My Mother, My Guide

‘If you didn’t know your parents, then it is important that you invent them.’

Those are not the exact words spoken by that wise person, but the spirit is there. For us who did not grow up having parents, we can still place them into our memories.

My mother passed when I was barely four, and all I have is a solitary photo. Yet there she stands like a candle, showing me the way to live, though her own life was completed so quickly. That unlived possibility seems so alive in her photo. I can see it in the way she presents herself – as if her life is already fully expressed! Is it because I recognize myself in who I see her to be, the gift she was appointed to share with me in her abrupt life?

Sometimes I write – nothing that seems important at first, just stray thoughts that spread out from my pen like some kind of mist, keeping out of sight what is real, substituting the mystical until my heart takes control of my writing hand. A yearning, a longing creeps into my words – no way to feel it completely. If I stay with it, embrace the mystery of it, there arises a twinge, a spark, a nudge…”Look here! I am here! Grab hold! I am alive!”
Can I be speaking for my mother? I like to think so.

Would she have wanted me to have lived a careful, restrained life so that I might have the years she had not? I doubt it. I know she would say about life, what poet Annie Dillard says about writing, ’One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not save it for another book: give it, give it all, give it now – something more will arise later, something better.’

What a way to live life! To live from our true character, risking everything, trusting that whatever we gained or lost would place us perpetually at the beginning of a life of new wonders. That is what I feel my mother is saying to me in her photo.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. You are precious and you would be proud of your son. For me, you got your job done! I love you.
Rich