The Journey Home Chapter 1: Heart of My Heart

Burying your mother is nothing short of life-draining.

Burying your mother that you love so dearly is tragic.

Burying your mother when she was so young, just 56, and when you were so young, just 34,  is horrible-awful-ugly. 

And sad.

I stayed in a state of complete fear and dread for many years as a little girl, that I would lose my mother.  I loved her like most little girls love their mamas.  I watched her, emulated her, and learned from her.  I remember trying to swing my hips the way she did, even before I had any.  I remember watching her spray her brush with perfume and then raking it back through her long, blond locks.  I remember her taking naps on the couch when I was teeny tiny and asking her for a pillow and her motioning for me to lay my head on that same hip so that I could rest with her, right next to her.  I remember asking her how to write my name and the way she showed me.  I remember how she hung my first attempts at writing in various spots in the house.  I remember her telling me how to spell the words to the letters I would write to my big sister for when she got home from school.  I remember waking up from naps and smelling and seeing the evidence that she had cleaned all 1000 square feet of our house  in its entirety while I lay still in dreamland.  I remember her taking me to pick out my very first pair of glasses and the way she put barrettes in my hair.  I remember her catching me in a big, fat lie and how she punished me in a way that set honesty in its place in my heart forever thereafter.  Her wisdom in motherhood, just like her hips, swung in both directions.

I remember being terrified that someday, I would not know every single word that she ever spoke to me.  I remember being truly terrified of stepping on a crack for fear of literally breaking her back.  I don’t know why I feared it so. 

 The thought of losing her. 

But I did.  At such a very young age. 

It seems I sensed her fragility early on in life.  It seems I knew and understood something about her that I didn’t know I knew until she was gone.  Maybe, just maybe, that is the reason why she called me Heart of My Heart.  Maybe, just maybe, that is why the last words she ever spoke to me were just that…..”You’re Heart of My Heart.” 

And then she made her final journey home.