birthdays & deathdays

Today would have been my Mom’s 84^th birthday.  She left us on February 8, 2026. She was alone, none of us got to say goodbye.  Tonight, instead of gathering around her with a cake and candles, we will gather with gratitude and memories on Zoom. 

Driving to work after returning from her funeral/burial in Phoenix, songs randomly served up through Spotify included: ‘Five thirty am’, ‘Flight from the City’, ‘How to Stay Sane in February’, ‘You Will Never Walk Alone’, ‘Perhaps it’s Meant to Be’, and ‘New Beginning’, in that order.

I made a playlist, it’s called ‘Mourning’.

I bought a pair of diamond earrings to wear to Mom’s funeral, Ted called them upside down Christmas trees,

I call them Divine Feminine.

I see black butterflies almost every day.

I share the words below, which I spoke at her funeral,  to continue to honor her memory and perhaps as a reminder that there is more at work here than what we can understand in our minds, see with our eyes, and touch with our hands.  It is heart and love and trust in the unknown and the unexplainable.  There are signs and symbols everywhere if we are willing to look with all of our being.

As soon as I got the call on Sunday at 6:30am I woke Ted up and then started dialing – Ellen, no answer, Joel, no answer, Jen, no answer – Lindsey, finally someone answered, I called the hospital and got through to Jen who was on her shift.  Then from East Coast to West we spread the news and shed an abundance of tears.  In the middle of all the calls Ted took Mac out for a walk.  When he came back, he was holding a flyer someone had taped to the house.  It was a notice of a Student Project that was being filmed on the street.  The title of the film?  Good Mourning!      

M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G

Reminiscing about Mom, Guzman said “Your Mom was always so joyful.”  I guess it was no accident that her middle name was Joy.  Did my grandparents already know who she was when they chose her name, or did she become her name?

As part of a New Year’s workshop in late December with the creator of a deck of Alchemy Cards, Kim Krans, I chose one card for each month of the year.  My card pick for the month of February was The Stone.  For each card she has a page in a book exploring the meaning and symbology.  This is what she wrote on the page about the Stone Archetype: “In Jewish Mourning traditions, stones are left at graves rather than flowers.  Sit with this vision for a moment and see what unfolds.” 

I don’t think it’s an accident that I spent 6 hours of my day on Saturday, the day before Mom died, binging the Netflix show, "Ripple".  In the opening episode there is a death and throughout the 8 wonderful, moving episodes you watch the unfolding and transformation of grief.  And you journey with characters you fall in love with and witness the unfolding of their lives, the pain, the losses, the loves, the friendships and you see the little and big synchronicities that connect them to each other and their own unfolding stories.

Mom’s life has been much like that, friendship, family, pain, love, successes and so many transitions and losses along the way.  And despite or perhaps because of all of it, what everyone around her experienced was a great kindness, that was expressed back out in the words: “I love your Mom.” 

I don’t think it’s any accident that the next thing I watched was a movie with Shirley McClain and Amanda Seifried called “The Last Word”.  Shirley McClain’s character is a retired formerly powerful, brilliant and successful business executive.  But she has a legacy problem – there is not one person on the planet that the young Obituary writer McClain hires to pre-write her Obit, (Amanda Siefried’s character), can find who has anything good to say about her.  She is not liked by anyone including her own daughter and she has grandchildren she doesn’t even know exist.  What ensues is her last-ditch effort to build a legacy that’s worthy of writing about.

This is a problem that Mom for sure did not have!

She had 5 grandchildren – Of course she was at the center of Corey, Adam’s lives from the day they were born and they were the center of her beating heart.  But also, there was Molly, Ryckie and Cole and she had enough room in her huge heart for each one of them too. 

Everyone loved Mom.  She had friendships that spanned 5 and 6 decades. And Karen’s flying across the country to be here with us is a testament to the power of her lasting friendships.  But these friendships were more than that; in Karen & Carol’s friendship in particular, we see that Mom’s friends were family. 

Someone in the last several days said to me, your Mom was always so full of light.  Kathy, who had been visiting my Mom weekly for the past year, helping me out with getting her groceries, doing Mom’s nails and just being there as a friend, literally burst into tears when I called to tell her the news.  Her nurse, everyone at Glen Terra, strangers she just met and people she knew for a long-long time all said the same thing “I loved your Mom.”  It didn’t matter whether they knew her for decades or minutes, people would always say “I love your Mom”. 

Last year I journeyed to Seattle for a 60^th birthday celebration with seven High School friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years.  I remember amongst beautiful reconnecting and reminiscing, they all agreed that hands down I had the best, the coolest Mom.  There was an outpouring of texts from them on Tuesday.  Karen Herman said this:  “ What a great woman she was.  I remember thinking back when I met her, wow, she was super hip, liberal and fun.  The cigarettes and the very cool pour over coffee!!!! (I only knew instant existed in middle school).” And she attached a photo of the Chemex!

At the end of Sunday’s shock and all the phone calls and a visit from my cousin/angel, Leah, I went to the Labyrinth.  I walked with the intention of letting go of the guilt that was swirling around me and through my veins all day, the guilt for not being with her for the last month and for not doing something more after her confused and somewhat delirious 1 AM call to me.  And I asked the labyrinth to help me find, my heart.  About halfway through the journey to the center, I heard “read what you wrote last night” it repeated at least one more time, insistent “read what you wrote last night.”

What did I write last night?  I had no idea, I didn’t even remember at first that I had written anything.

When I finished walking, I went inside and found the journal entry from the night before.  This is verbatim, the unedited version, of what I had written:

“I can’t sleep.  Last catch-up entry…today’s entry, finally, as one day turns into the next and I lie here at 3am tossing and turning.  Mom called at 1am and woke me from sleep in a delirium, what is she doing here, slurring her words and confused about where she is and how she got there.  I’m worried she’s headed back to the hospital.  This, following a flurry of activity also which I have not been able to see, sounded like a cleaning frenzy.  My bed is like a desk, strewn with electronics, computer, remote, books, and vacant of Ted, so filled with stuff.  It has been an absolutely disorienting month-and-a-half.  I’m still coughing a lot.  At one point I woke up not being able to breathe (well).  But I’m ok now.”

And I wrote this poem:

Eyes closed light

Darkest night

Tapestry appears behind lids shut tight

Don’t you just know when you have to stay

When it’s time to go away

Tunes float over anxious ears

The calm of lavender and chamomile

Failing the job they were tasked

In silence I sit here wondering what to do next

To slow down the time that’s gently slipping away

Try as I might, try as I might

Sleep will not meet this night

I wrote this around 3am, Mom died sometime between 2:45am when they last checked on her and 5:45am when they found her.

Monday afternoon, Mom’s godsend of a nurse Katya texted me this out of the blue, after asking how I was doing she said: “Ana (one of the onsite nurses) told me that she saw your Mom around 8pm on Saturday and she had her feet up by the TV and she was eating a big sandwich.  I thought maybe you wanted to know…”  Thank you, Katya, for chipping away at the stubborn plaque that is guilt.

Synchronicities

When we went to get some of Mom’s things we saw they had put up a frame on the entry table with a picture of my Mom that they took when she first arrived at Glen Terra.  Next to her picture there was another and I noticed that that person had died the day before Mom.  Who was that? I asked.  Cecilia told me, it was my Mom’s next-door neighbor. “And she has the same initials as your Mom,” she said.

I talked to Ellen Sunday evening.  “it was so weird”, she said, “I smelled cigarette smoke like 3 times today.” 

How Mom loved her cigarettes…and coffee…and talking on the phone…

So, remember in the beginning of this tapestry of synchronicities, I talked about Kindness… coming out of Mom’s struggles and pain? 

On Monday morning I sat for a meditation on grief and loss and was introduced to a poem.  I couldn’t think of a better way to tie up the loose ends of this tapestry than to share the writing of someone who has magically written the words that perhaps show us where that light Mom exuded comes from.

Perhaps within these words we will find the opportunity for us all to find kindness on the other side of this heavy loss. 

Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is,

you must lose things

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowds of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

photo © March 2025, Lynne Harris Bernstein

drawing "Divine Feminine" © February 2026