May 4: While I was at Jack’s for the wildflower weekend, Sylvia and I stayed in the guest bedroom. It felt nice but kind of heavy to be sleeping in one of the rooms that Mom had so meticulously decorated. She spent many years helping Jack decorate his home, and almost every detail was shaped by her sense of style. Between seeing her imprint on the walls around me, thinking back on all the wonderful family vacations we took together at Jacks, and being close to the beautiful Wisconsin River, my mind filtered through thoughts of Mom all weekend. I think that if after she died, her spirit dissipated into a million million pieces that many of them might have found their way to the Lower Wisconsin River. I can imagine her energy flitting over the water like the swallows or living on in the powerful down strokes of a bald eagle as it launches into the sky.
Bergum Bottoms was always one of Mom’s favorite places, and walking down the beautiful road – eating lunch next to the River with the little girl she never met on my lap – made me want to appreciate it for her.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that I now appreciate life more since losing Mom, but I would say that I’ve become innately aware of the impermanence of life. That feeling you get on New Year’s Eve singing Auld Lang Syne has stuck with me. I often find myself looking around at the place I am occupying, the people I am with, the feeling I have in my heart because of their company, and I hold onto it a little more because I know it’s a moment in time and that we really can’t count on having things repeat again and again just as we would wish. I don’t think go around thinking that bad things will or might happen, I just try to make things count a bit more, pay a little more attention, and love a little harder.
Back in September, Joe wrote a post on his blog that has really stuck with me:
Given any moment, I have a set of conditions under which my brain operates. I assume that there is something beneath my feet, holding me up. I assume that there will continue to be oxygen in the air for me to
breathe after this breath. I assume the Earth isn’t going to spontaneously combust. I assume that I have a father, a mother, two sisters, and a brother. When I take time to stop and think about these conditions under which I am continually operating, I realize that they aren’t all true. I rediscover the flaw in the code of my brain and it feels like an entirely new wound.
For me, the conditions under which I operate feel a little less certain than they did years ago.
I assume that the next time I see you, dear reader, we will have as nice a time together as we did last time. But you never know. So I’ve been responding to the unknowable-ness of our future by hanging on to the relationships that I treasure just a bit more tightly.
Sometimes I think it’s nice to get out of my normal routine for even a couple days. It seems to allow my brain to do some meandering along less traveled paths.