Pain into Beauty

I am a little girl, old enough to watch my younger brothers and sister, but too young to drive. 

I stand by the front window, the one in the dining room where I have a clear view of the driveway and the road in front of my house. 

I’m trying to quell a fear that my parents won’t come home. Not because they don’t want to, but for some reason outside of anyone’s control. Like a car wreck. 

I leave the window, with a knot in my stomach, only to return every few minutes to look down the road. 

Worry. 

It turns out they did come home, every time they left, until I left home myself and didn’t know their daily comings and goings. 

But it was fear or was it just a way to worry? Maybe I imagined that to be the worst thing that could happen in my young life and that is what I went to when my parents left. Worst case scenario. 

In the end, there came a time when my mom and dad didn’t come home or rather they went to another more permanent home. 

When that time came I was shocked and despairing in the case of my mom and relieved and heartbroken in the case of my dad. 

I think of them at random times, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with sharp pangs of longing. Longing for home and safety and familiarity and consistency. 

There are times they are with me. 

We are creatures who can turn pain into beauty.

Susan Cain

But I’ve learned there is a difference between worry and the actual event. When you worry, you’re on your own. When the thing actually happens, there are people to walk with you. 

When my mom passed away, it was totally unexpected. My dad called my husband and asked him to leave work to be with me. Even in his despair, my dad thought of me. So when I heard the news, I wasn’t alone. Scott was with me and helped to bear me up. Scott drove me to my dad’s where we gathered with my sister and her husband. Which lifted the burden a little. The next day my brothers and their families flew in. Which helped a little more. As more people gathered who loved her, I felt a literal lifting of a burden. It didn’t go away totally and lasted longer than that night, but the support was visceral. 

“…as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light;

Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God…”

Mosiah 18:8-9

On Mother’s Day weekend, I went to the Getty Villa in Malibu and walked through the garden and imagined my mom walking with me. I didn’t feel her exactly, but I remembered her and felt peace.