Only yesterday did I read the story of the woman who is given credit for creating Mother’s Day. It’s a rather sad story, this woman who was never a mother herself, but loved her own mother and recognized that mothers should be honored. According to the chronicle told, she spent her life and her livelihood trying to protect the fact that it was she who actually was the founder and not others who tried to claim it. When I read this, I was dismayed that history seems to remember this glaring need for her to ensure she received the credit. It may or may not be what is actually true, she isn’t here to tell the tale herself. Evidence says she had strong feelings about the holiday not being celebrated, like so many holidays, by the outward show of expensive gifts—another holiday to commercialize— but wanted it to be a true awareness of what mothers do for us, and the world. She commemorated mothers as having been the world’s peace makers.
I have marvelled many times over the years about all the brave mothers I have known. Those whose later years were marred by losing a daughter or a son, and being left with only memories of the love that filled their heart as they had watched their child grow into adulthood. And the other mothers who held their babies and young children, providing the loving hands that cared so beautifully as these young ones died too soon. I always remember my own mother, on this manufactured day, she who was not perfect—no mother is— but loved so perfectly. I think of all the ways she mothered me over the years, both near and afar, my inner awareness of her love and prayers going with me wherever life’s path took me.
I had the joy of sharing my mother’s love for 50 years. I thought this morning about another woman; some would say she actually didn’t get to be a mother. I knew her some years ago. She had birthed a child that was lifeless, but oh how she had loved this infant. She knew before his birth that he would not survive long, but planned for the hours or perhaps days, or miraculously more than that, whatever she was given, and how she would hold him and comfort him. It was not to be, this wish of hers, and a week before his actual due date his little heart stopped beating. I remember well the breathless swaddled bundle, held with tenderness by both of his parents, and the wee urn that his ashes were later placed in.
It doesn’t seem to matter, the length of time that a mother’s heart is spent with a child. Mothers don’t stop loving, because their child is gone. On this mother’s day, like Anne Jarvis, I know from experience what every mother has given and received— The True Gift— a mother’s love.
When I open my eyes, I see the river flowing out to the sea, as it continues to do, day after day, regardless of what else the day brings with the sunrise. It brings a sense of permanence that steadies us in a world full of change and surprise. Some things seem to stay the same. Yet the river, as it meanders past me, has changed even in these few years I have known it. Creeping farther up the bank each year, it sweeps more of the trees and the silt with each winter rainstorm and ensuing floods. Some mornings the glassy calm is a soothing balm while other days the white caps remind me of the larger pounding waves the river hurries past me to join. The original inhabitants of the river speak of the changes: it no longer teems with fish and its shores are no longer held secure with giant Sitka spruce reaching across the watery expanse. The river has its losses, too.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the evening as a fairly new nurse I had been assigned to the oncology floor. I still remember my patient (a young woman in her mid thirties with advanced ovarian cancer) the mother of the two young boys who sat with her husband as they forlornly waited at her bedside, squeezing her pale hands while she lay gasping with heavy breaths, and no longer cognizant of the rest of us. The little boys kissed their mother goodbye and went home with their grandmother. This young mother had been hospitalized a few days prior to my shift while suffering a pain crisis, requiring significant medication adjustment to alleviate her suffering; it was obvious to the medical staff that she was coming to the end of her life. Now her family was understanding this as well and attending vigil at her bedside.
I meet my patient, and think to myself, death by a thousand cuts. Incremental loss of mobility, independence, then slowly parts and pieces of his body, appendages removed, organs no longer functioning and blood vessels filled with sludge. I am not the one to judge what he considers quality of life, but I am appalled at his medical chart. It reads more like a medical dictionary than a story of someone’s health deterioration: so many terms, so many diseases, so many medications. In the midst of his disintegrating health, and very recent hospitalizations, there has not been one thought to complete an advanced directive or a POLST form; I know this because he tells me so. Without a choice about his code status, he remains full resuscitation should one of his poorly functioning body systems stop working. So while we are talking about his sadness and the losses in only 50 years of life, I ask the question, “Have you thought about how you want things to happen, as your health continues to worsen?” No, he actually hadn’t thought about the end of his life, even in the midst of several years of such tenuous health with chronic disease, in and out of the hospital. And no one had thought to mention, though he’d only lived 50 years, with his steadily advancing multi organ failure he may not have one more. So we had the conversation.
