I am grateful tonight for having had a good day. I must confess that it started off a little rocky and there were a few bumpy parts throughout the day. But by and large it’s been a pretty good day.
I want to start by acknowledging that this is the 17th anniversary of the death of my mother, Dorothy Jones Chamblee. I’m not sure if I have a single day when I don’t think of her at least once, and certainly the five-month period from December through May when she was diagnosed and ultimately died are always a bit blue for me. The acuteness of the grief has diminished after all these years, of course, but my body always seems to remember the grief long before the cause of the sadness creeps its way into my consciousness. The dates and memories of those five brief months are etched into my DNA and seem to go through a period of dormancy before triggered to begin waking up around Christmas time. As I said, it’s much less acute as it was during the first few years, but it’s still there hovering at the periphery of my consciousness.
Tonight I am grateful and celebrate the many ways in which my mother is still present in my life. Of course, I see her in the faces and mannerisms of my siblings and at times my own children, and am often surprised to see her face when I glance at my own reflection in the mirror. The older I get, the more like her I appear. I see that as a good thing. Mommy smiled a lot more than I do; but I am actively working on that, as I noted yesterday. And a radiant smile it was too. But more than the physical characteristics, my mother is reflected in so many of the ways I and my siblings have lived our lives, have raised our children, express our creativity, serve our communities. And in spite of the fact that she physically left this plane of existence 17 years ago, I still periodically say to myself, “I wonder what Mommy would think about this?”
I’m not sure if there’s a heaven or God or all of that stuff the faith I was raised with (in which my mother was a fervent believer), but if there is such a place, my mother is undoubtedly there and I hope watching over me in some way. In periods of distress, such as some of the times I’ve experienced more recently, I talk to her and ask for her guidance and briefly wish for her physical presence so I can lay my head on her lap, have her stroke my hair, and tell me everything is going to be alright. The funny part is, I can’t remember if I ever did that when she was alive! (though part of me believes I probably did.) Even if it’s only in my imagination, it works for me nonetheless.
I wrote about my mother in my blog post on Mother’s day a few weeks ago, so I won’t repeat myself. I simply want to reiterate my gratitude to her for who she was to me and how much a part of me she still is. And as the song I wrote for her (using her own words) says, “I’ll always thank God in his kindness for giving me someone like [her].”
Dorothy J. Chamblee, 1944
