Thank you, Mom.

Mom, it’s been just over a year since you passed away. I was disappointed I didn’t see your soul float from your body when I trudged back into your room and saw your body. I was too late and missed it.

Part of me was hoping your soul was still somewhere in the vicinity. I looked around the room, behind the door, and even peered out the window into the darkness that exists between night and early morning. I wasn’t sure if your soul would glow; you were so modest.

I wasn’t confident your soul could sustain the breeze, so I determined it had already floated through the neighbor’s yard and off into the trees. And with the dogs and all, I didn’t want to wake up the neighbors (or their dogs) trying to search for it.

You being a woman of strong faith, I felt the very last moment of your life really let me down. Surely the moment of death of my own mother would be more sacred than that time in college I worked for that moving company run by my college friends, and when I laid down that statue of Mary I was wrapping up from that old lady’s home chapel, I was literally frozen in the glow of the Holy Spirit.

You? Nothing. You just died.

I let go of the disappointment for a moment. I’m not sure I ever told you, but I’d already witnessed an old lady die in a nursing home several years back, so I knew what a dead body was when I saw it. I promptly called the hospice nurses to see if they could get your jaw shut before rigor mortis set in.

I don’t know why I just didn’t do it myself. I wasn’t comfortable touching your dead body.

I didn’t wake Dad. But he did sit in that old recliner of his mother’s I set up in your room. He sat there for many hours at a time. Occasionally, he’d come out and tell us if he thought you needed something. After a while, he stopped doing that. He just sat with you quietly, enjoying your final moments together.

He’s doing just fine now. He’s still lonely, and he still misses you, but he’s adjusting. A few weeks after you passed, I did call the ambulance on him because he’d quit eating but was still taking his usual dose of insulin, and his blood sugar crashed.

He spent a few days in the hospital. People came to see him. He loved it. You would’ve gotten a kick out of it.

Ended up he’d lost nearly 20 pounds since his last visit right before you went into hospice, and his blood sugar had kind of leveled out. He was off his insulin for a while. But as the months went on, he got back to some of his old ways, and the doctor put him back on the insulin. Just a much lower dosage.

I’ll stop going on about Dad, but I will say, the thing you’d find the most interesting about him is how different he is without you around. He’s kind of lost his “Puck”ness. He lost his familiar feedback loop. Huh.

Oh! And he also lost his license. His eyes.

I thought he’d tailspin to his end. But nope! Doesn’t seem to faze him. And no, he’s not holding on to hope that he’ll get it back. Seems he’s able to get his fix on his daily drives out to the mailbox.

Weird.

I was thinking between losing you and his license, he’d quickly die of loneliness, but he calls Auntie Thelma every morning, and she calls him every afternoon. He also calls Kate down the road every morning to give her his (blood sugar) numbers. And he’s able to get to church every week, and the guys pick him up for coffee on occasion.

What’s weird, though, is he’s pretty much turned into the guy you always wanted him to be. He still has his annoying temperament sometimes, and he stews about things. He still enjoys embarrassing me.

But it’s different. He doesn’t bother me as much.

You know, there’s this underlying expectation, especially with you because you were such a wonderful mother, that I need to memorialize you in only a positive light.

But it’s ok for me to tell you that you weren’t perfect. I mean, you never said you were. And I don’t think I ever once in my life criticized you.

It’s just so interesting with you gone how I realize just how much of the “problems” were you. The finances for one. I didn’t realize just how much had been left undone, or how long it had been like that. It took me an entire year to get the ship turned around.

What’s so fascinating, with you gone, is how much my perspective has changed about how things were. Now that I think about it everything was filtered through you.

You just left out the you part. Not that I uncovered some great mystery as to what was really going on, it’s just, looking at our family through your lens…that’s all I knew. Now I have to look at it through my own lens. And my lens has it’s own settings.

On a more positive note, we did find a place to honor your wish to be buried in the ground. It’s quite a lovely spot right there along the creek. You would most certainly approve. You’re in a lovely urn. Davey’s stuffy is holding you so you can be with all the kids you dearly loved and helped.

Oh, and that lily that bloomed just before you died. It’s still alive, and I gave it to Linda. Dad overwaters the house plants but he doesn’t do it often enough so they manage to hang on.

You know, I set out with the best of intentions to write you a more positive letter. Thanking you for being such a great mom, holding me when I had that fever and pirates were attacking me, protecting me from Dad, and being so supportive helping me reconnect with my birth mom. Maybe someday I’ll write you that letter.

But I felt like, at least right now, you needed to know the truth. Maybe I should have told you sooner. You were always so convincing, though, that it never occurred to me to question it.