New Perspectives

I am reminded more and more that many of life’s most difficult moments can hold more than just a single lesson. The day that we buried my mother was one of the most difficult days of my life. She was elderly, and I knew in my subconscious that our days together were numbered, but I never expected the end to come so quickly. Her death was due to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, so thankfully she passed quietly in her sleep. But I felt that I never really said all of the things that I should have. I should have told her more often how much I loved her, and how special she was to all of our family. So this final day of saying goodbye was a challenge for me, and for many members of our family.

When my father passed 10 years earlier, the grandchildren were just that, children. I have memories of my nieces, who are older than my son, standing with their arms around him. His head barely reached their shoulders. But a decade brought many changes to the world and to our family. And the three cousins who were just children when they said goodbye to their grandpa are now three adults saying goodbye to their grandma.

But what time and distance could not, and did not change was the way that these three young people faced this painful day. Again, arm in arm, the three approached the casket for one last moment with their beloved grandma. This time, the young man in the center stood a head taller than the ladies, who flanked him. And they each rested their head on his broad shoulders as he hugged them. But when I looked on from a few feet away I could still see the faces of those children from a decade ago. Their eyes were still streaming tears, and they all looked as if a tiny piece of their hearts was lost forever. At the time, my heart ached for their loss as well as my own. I wondered if this was the last piece of their childhood that was being torn away from them.

That image will be forever frozen in my mind as if I am opening a book and seeing a photograph that doesn’t exist. Almost another decade has passed since that difficult day, and as expected, I have come to view that picture in my mind in a new light. Again, the world and our family have continued to change, which has provided me with a new perspective on that day. I never imagined that could be the last time I saw those three people standing arm in arm, lovingly supporting one another. But it might have been. Families fall onto hard times, suffer hardships and can even fall apart for reasons that are beyond our control.

So now I close my eyes and view that image as a legacy of how those three children were raised and the adults that they became. My mother and father loved them all deeply and that love was reciprocated by all three of them. And in their moment of loss and pain, they came together one last time to say goodbye to a grandma who meant the world to each one of them. It didn’t matter that they had been separated by thousands of miles and almost a decade, they were able to set that aside for a day and just be Joyce’s grandkids.

A part of me has been angry, sad and hurt over the past several years as my family seemed to fade away after Mom was gone. Apparently, Mom and Dad were the glue that held us all together, and none of us possessed the strength to do that after they were gone. But I am reminded of that moment and that image, I know that they taught us how to love and how to be a family. They gave us the tools to go out and find our own places in this world and to build families of our own. What I once viewed as an image of an ending, was actually an image of a new beginning. It was the moment that the next generation was beginning to form the lives that would bring them happiness, love, and contentment in this world.