A Favor for Mom

A couple of days ago, Mom was holding my finger so tightly that I had to lean down and gently ask her to let go. When I did—and Dad can confirm this—she not only loosened her grip, she actually pulled her hand back a little, almost as if to say, “Sorry about that,” in the only language her body still had.

Yesterday afternoon, after we’d spoken with the doctor and nurse Riley, Dad understandably needed some time alone to gather himself. Steve and Brian did the responsible thing and went straight to the phones, calling family and friends, making sure the people who needed to know what was going on were brought into the circle. I’m not entirely sure where John went at that moment.

I walked straight to B9—Mom’s room.

Because while I understood how important it was to make those calls and get family to the hospital, those weren’t the voices I needed just then. The only person I needed to be with and talk to in that moment was mom.

When I was in college—and especially in grad school—Mom and I used to talk on the phone two or three times a week, often for an hour at a time. I loved those conversations. For the first time in my life, my mom wasn’t just “Mom”; she was my friend. I started to actually get to know her and to understand my parents’ life together.

There’s a quiet shift that happens when you stop seeing your parents only as the people who raised you and start seeing them as full human beings. It’s a strange and beautiful transition to realize that “Mom” and “Dad” had entire lives before you existed—lives lived in places you’ve never seen, filled with crazy adventures and choices you never witnessed, with joys and heartaches you never knew about—and that then they bent the arc of all of that because they wanted a family. Because they wanted you.

During that time, one of the themes that kept coming up between us—especially when Mitch Albom’s books were so popular—was belief and god.

No one who knew Mom would ever describe her as “churchy”—I can barely type that without snickering. But she believed, quietly and steadily. Her faith had nothing to do with how often she sat in a pew and everything to do with how she lived, how she loved people, and how she showed up for her family. In that way, I think she was spiritual.

I remember telling her once about a paper I’d written, where I explained the cosmological argument: the idea of an infinite regress of causes and how some philosophers say that an endless chain backwards doesn’t make sense, so there has to be a first cause that begins everything. She listened, mumbling agreements or making “hmmm” noises, while I walked her through the logic and explained my theory.

I told her, “God doesn’t wear Reeboks.” What I meant was that if a being is truly all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, that being is also not stupid. You can’t fool a God like that. I told her I thought it was silly when people acted like they could game the system, or that their particular denomination or label was the thing that really mattered at the end of the day.

What mattered, I said, was living a life of purpose, caring about and for other people, and doing your imperfect best to be a good person. Because if God is that first cause, He isn’t stupid. He will know who you really were and how you lived, regardless of the label you slap on yourself.

She agreed with that. But then she did something so perfectly her: she took all my carefully built logic and walked right past it with a single, simple truth. She told me that whether or not my argument was right didn’t really matter to people like her, because she already knew what she believed. I said something like, “I get that, but isn’t it nice attach some reasoning to it?” She said it was a really good idea for a paper in a religion class, but that a lot of people didn’t need reasoning to hold their faith together. She didn’t need to win a debate with anyone, because her belief was settled.

I remember realizing then that while my brain needed arguments and structure and intellectual scaffolding, my mom’s simply didn’t. She just believed. And I respected that, because she wasn’t noisy or performative about it, but showed it in the way she lived, in the way she loved, in the way she kept showing up for us and for her family, over and over again.

As she got older, Mom got sillier and funnier, and at times was absolutely ridiculous in the best possible way. I don’t know the statistics, but I can’t imagine there are many families with multiple “that time Mom shit her pants in public” stories. Yet no matter how many swear words came pouring out of her mouth over a game of Spades or Skip-Bo, that same steady, believing woman was always there underneath it all.

If anyone reading this doesn’t know the story, you really should ask Dawn sometime about playing cards with Mom and her very… creative and direct use of the C-word. If I’m not mistaken, it wasn’t long after they first met. There’s another C-word, though, that most of us didn’t often associate with her: complicated.

In her own way, Mom was exactly that—a person who could, on occasion, unleash a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush, even calling one of her daughters-in-law a truly awful word over something completely trivial (and somehow in a nice way, if that makes any sense). And yet, beneath all of that, the faith and the quiet belief were still there. That complexity—that mix of sharp edges and a soft heart—is part of what made her so deeply lovable to so many.

So when I say that the hand I held a couple of days ago belongs to the same person who believed her entire life, I mean the whole of her: the worrier; the card-playing, sailor-mouthed comedian; the vacation disaster magnet—I once watched her fly out of a golf cart and roll end over end down a steep hill in Florida without ever losing the cigarette from her mouth; the young woman who lost her own mother far too young and who drove across Europe in a tiny car with her high school sweetheart; the single biggest sweet tooth I’ve ever known; the woman who loved her family more than anything; and the person whose faith, believe it or not, ran like a quiet current beneath all of it.

We all know she was a nervous wreck, especially as she got older. She worried… a lot. That’s why, when you say goodbye, I’d like everyone to remind her what a wonderful day this is—not for us, but for her. That there are at least three very special people who are going to be thrilled to see her.

A father who was far from perfect, but whom she loved so much that she rarely allowed herself to notice his flaws.

A mother who was taken from her too early, stealing a lifetime of conversations and moments and leaving a hole in her heart that never fully healed.

And a daughter she never got to know, whose absence, I truly believe, nearly broke her and haunted her for the rest of her life.

It is a beautiful day because she’s going to see Gretchen again—she and Dad’s beloved daughter, our sister—who missed out on a lifetime of being loved and supported every bit as fiercely as Mom, Dad, and the rest of our family have loved us.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I believe Mom can hear us, and the very last thing any of us would ever want is for her to be afraid of this journey—of what may be the most beautiful day of her life: the day she gets to pick those relationships back up, to begin anew, to embrace her mother and hold the daughter she has imagined and loved for all these years. The day she will know, fully and clearly, that she will see us again as well, and that there will be a time when all of us are together again.

So, a favor for mom:

Today, whatever each of us personally believes, let’s agree—just for this day—to stand beside her in what she believed. We’ll all have things we need to say, our own memories and private conversations with her, but when it comes to goodbye, let’s offer it in a way that sends her forward with as little fear and as much peace as possible. Let’s make sure she hears, in whatever way she’s able, that although we will miss her terribly, we are genuinely grateful for the path that lies ahead of her, and for the beloved faces and souls with whom she is about to reunite.

Because in the end, we will remember her—and she will be defined—by the life she lived and the love she gave. Mom was an imperfect human being, like all of us, but a truly good one, who laughed with her whole heart and loved her family above all else.

The best way we can honor that is to let her go with love, with gratitude, and with the same quiet hope she carried in her heart all her life.