Thank you, Sweetheart
Reciting the Angelus at Noon, on the road to Ohura to visit my mother’s grave on the 10th October, 2020. To see a video of me laying lilies on her grave, click here.
The unintegrated pain in our ancestral and collective lineages lives on in us, waiting for us to turn towards it, unfreeze, lovingly acknowledge, accept and heal. It is the contemplative and active work of the daughters and the sons to take on what is still as yet unresolved in their parents, said Jung. When a family line has suffered any kind of trauma, the generations that come after work together to heal the pain that still seeks healing, the sorrow that is always seeking to express the reunion of joy. Such is my mother’s and my own life - the joy and sorrow and abiding love inextricably bound to mine and my two children. This poem seeks to integrate both the sorrowful and the joyful memories in ways that see and feel healing and miracles abound. Here is a Love Song to my mother, who passed in 1991. And the bridge she crossed to let me know that she is with us always. I post this on All Souls Day, in honour of my Mother.
What impossible choice
Did my mother make
When she stood before her birth
Watching the movie of her life?
No Cary Grant or Doris Day,
No fifties musical in Technicolour
And Cinemascope,
And yet
She came.
Did she think, “I cannot do this,” when she
Watched the raid from comfortable bed
In the middle of the night?
The press of fear in people on the train
With only her mother’s hand to keep her warm?
The foreign land,
The forever biting snow,
The stomach aching for bread,
The blanket on the mud floor
That became the near-death shroud,
When the fever from malaria
Did not do the job?
She watched, and still she leapt
Into her mother’s womb...
The cry at birth,
The remembrance before forgetting
Of the life she would embrace.
Why did she come?
Look, there’s Hela up ahead
And Milak and Tadeusz
And William toddling along!
They’re running in a field of hay
It’s bright gold with swaying light,
And Stefania is trailing after her,
Somewhere still coming over the hill.
She’ll be there, too.
“Come with us,” they shout.
And she sees a man
Who is more handsome than Cary Grant,
Who can’t dance like Gene Kelly
Or do an Elvis swivel of hips,
But he paints her a bouquet of roses on their engagement
And makes her a home with his hands,
And wraps a new shawl of love around her
In which she enfolds their daughters.
Until he dies on a Sunday
And she is bereft,
But stays.
And she sees a house on a hill
Where she can begin her life again.
The man at the dance
Who once wanted to be a priest,
He loves her
They have two daughters.
She knits a fine green lace dress for each of them.
The blanket now only descends in the night
When she hears the cries of the dead.
And then there’s the shouting
intermingling with dancing.
The storming and the mending.
Two daughters now starring in this,
staring fearfully at this, erupted trauma.
Their parents unable to let go of the
Burned images on the retina
Of parents shot at dawn or lost at dawn.
They love and hurt and love again.
He leaves unable to stem the rising darkness of frozen pain.
The joy intermingles with the always tidal-rising pain.
“Bring my children back to the Land of the Living,”
she wails as she sees a wild pig hung to drain.
And her two little girls huddle together
under a floral flannelette sheet
And make up stories to tell each other
In a tapping language that they share, that is theirs alone.
The third man at the dance,
She refuses his hand.
Instead she puts on her dress
Of paisley silk
And flies off to find the man in Heaven
Striding along the tuatara's ridgeback,
With two little girls trailing behind.
And time passes, sometimes in light and
sometimes in pained numbness.
She trails back and forth to earth,
Half there-half here
For a few more years, waiting
Till her youngest
Is safely married
And wearing a dress of pearls and roses.
Why, as she watched this movie -
The terror, tragedy and joy and romance
Reel out
Along the decades of her life -
Did she say, “Yes, I’ll come”?
So she could find us here,
And hold us
And love them
And watch them leave
And see us grow;
Teach us to hula and hula hoop
And fatten up our skinny bones.
So she could feel acutely
Dark Absence and Loss,
And the almost-touch of Love again, again
In endless nights of ardent prayer.
And so she could wait and watch and pray with us,
And cook and sing and sway with us,
And stride across hills with us,
And play this Game of Life with us.
This spiralling thread and spinning wheel,
She knew it well —
And so she came.
Too much love here
Despite the pain.
And then that last burst,
Running to join them,
Breath labouring now
As the credits
Rolled.
After her last dark night
Where she turns to me at dawn and says,
“Now I understand…”
To a fanfare she comes home
“He’s here, they’re all here…”
We watch her
Sit up, face northeast,
And reach out to touch tenderly
his hand.
Embrace the joy
At their reunion
On her return.
Why did she choose to be born?
The simple answer?
The labour pain is transmuted,
is forgotten, is witnessed,
and held healed by all who each, in Love,
Come.
Twenty-nine years ago, two months after my mother died, I went to visit her grave in Ohura – along the back roads between Taumaranui and New Plymouth, where she lived with her first husband before he was killed in a tragic accident. As I was travelling up the hill to the cemetery I looked up, a gift of lilies for my mother in my hand, and I saw a kingfisher sitting on a telephone wire. The air changed, charged, and suddenly I heard my mother's voice speaking Polish. She had said to me, “Dziękuję kochanie.” At the time, I didn't know what it meant, as we had never formerly learned Polish. I knew Dziękuję was “thank you.” But the other word, I couldn’t recall. When I returned home I looked up kochanie – this was before Google transmitted instant search results to mobile phones - I discovered a gift she had given me in return. She had whispered to me, across a veil and through the cross hatched DNA strands of life, Thank you, Sweetheart.
Photo credit: Liv Bruce, @livvie_bruce, on Unsplash