“Mommy.” I held onto that word far longer than my peers. I knew it wasn’t cool. I knew “mom” is what everyone graduates to. I knew I had to join the ranks.
But it was harrowing for my little soul. I didn’t want to let go of mommy, in part because “mom” came out like an incomplete thought. It felt like a half-effort. A sentence without a verb. A communication where the hearer is still leaning in and wondering what is yet to come.
Also, I worried for mom. I felt the mommy-to-mom transition would be hard for her to accept. I had no proof of this, other than years of her adoring us as her little children. It was difficult to imagine her losing-with-ease such a regular, audible symbol of that era.
(Mommy days)
Even so, “mom” felt inevitable.
I don’t remember the precise season or year, but I do remember I made a point to give formal notice.
“I think I am going to start saying ‘mom’ instead of ‘mommy.’”
“Ok honey,” she smiled in a knowing nod of love.
That smile.
She could light up a room, cast out cusp-of-adolescence anxiety, and make you believe anything was possible.
It was a painful irony many years later that mom would endure her last year speaking sentences that arrived as incomplete thoughts. Sentences that came without verbs. Sentences that left you wondering what is yet to come all while knowing just how much will simply not be coming at all.
There’s no silver lining to brain cancer.
What I do remember was sitting in her living room in May of 2019, five months after her brain surgery. I flipped through old family photos and cried as she held me. Her sentences may have been half upon arrival, but her love was full-on mommy. I’ll never forget that very last time she held me in way that made it abundantly clear: I was not the adult taking care of mom, she was mommy taking care of her child.
Nor will I forget the days immediately following her death on November 11, 2019.
I’d never cried over anything for more than a few moments. Certainly never eight consecutive days, tears repeatedly cascading to floods without warning. Certainly not floor-bound in the fetal position, time and again.
It mattered not the dozens of memorial services over which I had presided nor the truths I had declared behind the pulpit. What I knew to be true more deeply than anything else in the world was the profound emptiness of everything else around me. The profound finality of it all.
How strange a thing to want to grow up and cut the expressions of love in half. Tighten and formalize things. Assure ourselves that all the single syllables and incomplete sentences still communicated The Thing.
And then the inevitable comes - always too fast, too soon, too wrong.
And with no formal notice at all, the many years of incomplete sentences now flood forth with every last subject, verb, and syllable that had been previously withheld.
But in my case, since the sobs took up so much air, there was only one word you could hear me crying from the floor:
Mommy.
Mommy.
Mommy.
(June 2019)
So beautifully written with so much love. God bless!
So beautifully written, Bobby!