Therese

Therese Harman

November 28, 1925 - January 18, 2006

First Year Anniversary Meditation

by: her daughter Bernadette

~Coming Full Circle~

Until last year, January 18 was just the wedding anniversary of my mother’s parents, Richard and Bertha, long-dead and not well-known to me except through the stories my mother told me about them. And then my mother died on that same day.

As I walk toward the one-year anniversary of her death this January 18, I think of it not so much as an anniversary—which ought to be happy and gay—but as my personal Remembrance Day. I shall take a moment, perhaps an hour of silence, to sift through the memories we made together. While there hasn’t been a day in this first year of raw grief when I haven’t recollected memories of her, perhaps this anniversary will mark the beginning of a time when I don’t wake up every day with a black band of mourning around my heart.

Not being an old-world Italian woman, I haven’t forgone colour for the long black dress that tells the world I am bereaved, and not being Jewish, I don’t chant the kaddish each Sabbath with others who stand in the circle of grief that first year. Our Christian world pays lip-service to grief, and our secular community gives us three days to bury the dead and another two weeks to get over it and on with our lives.

But I am a motherless child, an orphan; an adult woman but still my mother’s child even as we forged a friendship that went beyond mother and daughter. I cherish the memories of my mother because I almost didn’t have her, as she seriously considered giving me away at birth. She had four children at home and had just given birth to identical twins, while the woman in the next bed of the maternity ward was weeping inconsolably because her baby was stillborn. My mother weighed her options: given that I was less than four pounds, if she gave me away and I died, the other woman would have lost two babies; and if she gave the stronger first-born twin away and I died, she would be bereft herself. And so, while my mother and sister were discharged from the hospital after five days, I was left to fatten up in the incubator. Each day one of my brothers hopped on his bicycle to deliver bottles of fresh mother’s milk to the head nurse for me. My mother came as often as anyone with four children and a newborn at home could, but not often enough to allow me to suckle at her breast at every feeding. But after several weeks of being in the hospital, my mother wrapped me in a shawl and brought me home, placing me in the crib beside my twin sister.

Perhaps it is the tenuousness of this beginning that makes me fond of my belly button. It is the thumbprint of my mother’s love and reminds me that I am irrevocably connected to her, just as her belly button connected my mother to her mother.

My mother told me that as each baby made its presence known, elbowing and kicking within her womb, she measured the tiny foot growing week by week. Last year, as ovarian cancer strangled my mother’s life, I found myself measuring the size of the tumours footprinted across her belly. I remember leaning over and kissing her belly button protruding like that of a pregnant woman nurturing new life inside, except she was nurturing death. Splashing kisses along her belly reminded me of my mother planting fat noisy kisses on belly buttons after changing diapers, and kissing years of skinned knees and childhood hurts away. How I wish I could have kissed away this hurt and made it better—the tumours, the fluid collecting in her lungs and abdomen robbing her of air and distending her belly, the inexplicable pains that came unbidden, all of it stealing her lifeblood. But she made peace with the tumours growing inside her, calling it “my baby” and, following her example, I too, learned to make my peace with it.

She flew free of the ravages of ovarian cancer in the early dawn during a terrible ice storm. It is told that the ancients believed that when a great soul departs this earth, the wind rages—the greater the soul, the greater the wind to carry them away. As the snow swirled round us that day, I said to my twin, “There’s Mamma, letting us know that life on the other side is glorious,” just as she enthused about the world beyond her window whenever the snow blew.

Now I am left with only my memories and a few keepsakes, some of her brightly-coloured shirts and her red wool shawl hanging in my closet—and my belly button. While she never did give me away, last year I found myself giving her back into the keeping of her parents. This year I tie off the cord of the first circle of seasons without her beside me, but I knew the circle was complete when I realized that my mother died on her parents’ wedding anniversary. I had forgotten until a few hours after she died, when I read the inscription on her mother’s gold wedding band that my mother wore, alongside her own since her mother’s death 32 years ago. Today I carry them both with me, having had the time-worn band melded into my wedding ring.

My mother loved dancing, and when she died we dressed her in a favourite dress and her black dance shoes ready for the party to which she’d been invited. On January 18, there will be dancing up above as the family that has gone before us celebrates their first anniversary of being together again.

Music: ~Healing~ Artist unknown

Font used "Andy" and "Hansa"