In memory of my mother’s passing, I’m paraphrasing a passage from a book by Parker Palmer. It expresses exactly what I experienced. I share this as a way to reach out to other people who are dealing with loss and grief.
A few years ago, my mother died. She was more than a good person, and the months and years following her death were a long, hard winter for me. But in the midst of that ice and loss, I came into a certain clarity that I lacked when she was alive. I saw something that had been concealed when the abundance of her love surrounded me. I saw how I had relied on her to help me cushion life’s harsher blows.
When she could no longer do that, my first thought was, “Now I must do it for myself.” But as time went on, I saw a deeper truth: it never was my mother absorbing those blows but a larger and deeper grace that she taught me to rely on.
When my mother was alive, I confused the teaching with the teacher.
My teacher is gone now, but the grace is still there. And my clarity about that fact has allowed her teaching to take deeper root in me. Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.