My mom died.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

My momma died.

It was a rapid decline, the doctors say it was vascular dementia even though months ago she was one of the sharpest people we all knew. Her final days were peaceful as she spoke about seeing all her deceased loved ones until the day came when she no longer opened her eyes or spoke. Days later she departed our mortal world.

I’m writing to you from the Sacred Valley in Peru, on a family vacation we took following the death of my momma. I’ve been wanting to write this to you for some time and it took a sick child today for me to have the space to share.

I want to share with you the gift my mother gave me. While I do weep daily, mostly between five and six in the afternoon, my mother overwhelmingly left me with a sense of peace, not only in her death but in my own mortality.

One thing I learned from Sue Johnson, who also recently passed away, is the concept of abstraction. When a baby’s caregiver leaves the room, that caregiver has disappeared from the world as far as baby is concerned. It is a process of maturity in love when people are able to abstract that their special loved one still exists, even when parted by great distances and time. Given the magic of secure attachment, we’re able to carry our person in our heart as we venture out into the world, we actually become constructively dependent which can look a lot like independence. As the father of attachment theory John Bowlby said “All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

My mom said many things to me during her final days. She told me I was good, she told me to roll up her hospital bedding like a sleeping bag “like we’re going camping, let’s go!.” She told me that she was going on walks with her long deceased grandmother. A lot of things she communicated, I listened with all the presence I could muster because I never knew what would be the last thing she would say to me. In fact, the last thing I can remember her saying to me was “you’re too serious.”

It was a profound experience I had with her in one moment that I attribute my current state of peace to. My mom, Julie, she stopped talking for several days and then suddenly said to me “I need you, but I don’t want you to miss anything.”

Her words were punctuated by the long silence, the waiting in anticipation if she would ever send me anymore messages in a bottle from her island in the sea of consciousness. Her statement rippled through me and reached my core, she needs me and is saying so, while also being dependent and near mental oblivion, she was still totally and completely my mother. Not wanting me to miss cultivating my garden, seeing my children, taking a family vacation. In her deepest desperation and shedding of a “mortal coil,” not remembering where or when she was, she still put me, her son first.

In that moment I was again a baby in her arms being soothed, and yet an adult who deeply wanted to reassure her that she was everything in my world at this time, she needed me and there was nothing to miss out there, in that world. My eyes reflexively gushed tears and I told her, I’m not missing anything, that she and what she was feeling was the most important thing in the world. My tears and sobs cut through the veil of life and death, reached through the thick swamp of dementia and in Julie’s eye arose my mother shining through. An inexplicable gaze that shook me with a mystic like vision of me falling off a bike when I was six, my mother scooping me up in her arms and holding me. It was that same look she had every time I fell, had a belly ache, was heartbroken in love, it was that magical look. In that moment my mom was there for me and I for her, in perhaps the most profound way I had ever experienced.

This is the gift my mom gave me, and it’s one I hope we all discover. It is a medicine for depression and anxiety, an existential aid.

While we weren’t always tight, she reassured me we were good. That while she left me here to complete my own journey, she still feels so very nearby. These moments in life are strong cords that maintain bonds even in the densest extremes of Father Time’s work. Bonds as such serve like umbilical cords between the living and dead and can grace us with a taste of the never-ending and happen in the blink of an eye.