When A Mother Dies

Iona Lucille Wirth Kudlacek
(November 5, 1933-August 30, 2013)

The inevitable spinning of the wheel of life has come around to the time of my mother’s death. I am surprised at how much grief and forgiveness I feel in my heart because we spent very little time together as adults. Our relationship was filled with pain and misunderstandings.
The memories that are flooding my awareness are the subtle sensations of being in my mother’s presence, the scent of her body, the sensation of the grounded bones of her German ancestry, large and strong. The goodness of my mother’s presence is gifting me with childhood memories of spending time on the earth, gathering earth’s bounty and taking it to our kitchen, preparing, canning, cooking, and creating nourishment from nature’s bounty. I am remembering her smile and the way she laughed when she thought something was funny. I see her large, fleshy hands, her large fingers busy with home-crafting.
I am forgetting the bitterness and the cruelty that spilled out in misguided coping moments from both of us. She suffered a great deal as women will do. And I forgive her. My once bad mother has become something of a wonder woman, my perspective forever changed, born out of the distance of time and the maturity of understanding. My mother loved flowers and gardening and she will always be standing in her garden surrounded by the beauty, the peace, and the calm that certainly fed her soul in hard times. She did her best with what she knew and had to work with. I feel a freedom in loving her in her death that I never knew while she walked the earth.
In saying good-by I am given the gifts we both never knew she had given me.