After Life

When my dad died in January, my friend Jenny sent me one of those electric picture frames that rotates through favorite photos all day long. I wasn’t keen on it at first. One more device. One more thing to figure out and remember to update. But I finally got around to it. There are about 25 pictures on it. A couple of Forrest, my mom, my dad, an early one of Brent and me. The rest are flowers, pictures I’ve taken that thrill me because flowers are a miracle.

Sometimes when I walk into the room where the Aura frame is, my mom will be looking at me. I’ll say, hi Momma, then carry on with whatever I’m doing. Other times, I say, hi Momma, stop to look at her for a beat or two, then tell her I’m not sure if I miss her or not. That must sound terrible, but I feel like she understands, and it’s true. I’ve lived on the other side of the country for so long that I’m used to her not being close by. It’s the same with my dad.

Before they died, I wondered how I’d respond when they did. Would I be shattered? Would I feel relief that whatever suffering or demise they might face was behind them? Behind me. Would I be grateful that I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about how they might die. I would know. We were lucky. Neither suffered too terribly or for over-long.

When I sat down to write this morning, a half-page of scrap paper I’d written on months ago slipped out of my notebook. I’d forgotten about it and it made me laugh. The first sentence is a massive understatement, but I remember realizing that if I wrote about my mom with a little snarkiness, I could write more honestly, less sentimentally; that I could capture a fuller picture of who she was and who I became because of her. Let’s put it this way, my snarkiness was something she knew a lot about. Reading this paragraph brought her back to me in full color. Made me want to write some more. Get to know her better. Capture more of her for myself:

My mother was not a dingbat. She’s dead now, so I’m not saying she was not a dingbat to saint-ify her. God knows she’s endured enough of that already. She wasn’t perfect, but her imperfections did not include dingbat-ism if you want to call being a dingbat an imperfection. She was just very smart. Nothing got past her. She had two of those proverbial eyes in the back of her head, not in a weird way but in a motherly way, as though she could read your mind and cared enough to read it thoroughly.